CHAPTER LVII.

UNSEXED WOMANHOOD.

The women of France had, perhaps, more excuse for revolt than those of any other country. Misery, hardship and injustice, drove them into a storm of politics with terrible violence. With a single leap they sprang out of absolute subjugation into a wild chaos of ideas. In riot, rapine, and bloodthirstiness, they shamed the coarsest men by their unbridled excesses. While violating all law, and trampling human rights under foot, they sang pæans to liberty, and inaugurated their terrible orgies with declarations of equal rights and eternal brotherhood. Such were the women who, claiming political equality with men, and superiority over monarchs, flung all the sweet attributes of the sex behind them in the turmoil of politics, and in a subsequent carnival of blood forgot that they had ever been wives and mothers.

How could it be otherwise? The woman who once flings aside all the beautiful entanglements of home, and assumes duties which never were intended for her; who gives free rein to the coarser passions, plunges into such fierce struggles as brutalize men and degrade her beneath their lowest level. If a woman like this expects to return at any period to the gentle immunities of home life, she knows little of the destiny she is carving out for herself.

Imagine these women going home from a fierce debate at the clubs to caress their little ones, and teach them their prayers at night; could they touch the smiling mouths of innocent children with lips hot with smouldering hate, or curl their silken tresses over fingers wet with human blood? Could they, without an outrage on humanity, permit their little ones to kneel in holy prayer at the feet which had just been treading down saw-dust around the guillotine? After partaking of such scenes, could any woman expect to go back to her sweet motherhood in the shelter of a pure love? No; the quiet life, the care of childhood, the love of strong men, are not for such women. Let them once forsake the shelter of home, the blessedness of a calm hearthstone, and half that is valuable in existence lies behind them. When they enter the turmoil of moral or physical war, return is impossible; a great gulf has been dug between them and the happiness of womanhood, which can never be re-passed.

In her despair, Madame Gosner thought nothing of the great moral effect her action might produce. She had for years been urged forward by one grand, womanly motive—the freedom of her husband. If this object had sometimes led her into strange positions, great love had always sanctified them. She had endured poverty, humiliation, sickness, with the strength of a martyr, and in all things had protected the delicacy of her child. Even in the depths of her sorrow she had found time to educate this girl, and fill her mind with all the refinements which make womanhood beautiful. But now, in the madness of her despair, she forgot everything but her wrongs, and the agony of a slain hope. What was that miserable shadow of a home to her? What was there on the broad earth but sorrow and desolation for a woman so bereaved, and so cruelly dealt by? In her anguish she felt a yearning sympathy for thousands and thousands of women, who haunted the market places and streets of Paris, with an eternal craving for bread written on their half-famished faces; for the earth, as well as the rulers of the earth, had, for two successive years, been cruel to the poor. The sufferings of these people became a part of her own wrongs. In the mighty thirst of her revenge, she was ready to embrace the whole universe of suffering. Was she insane? Had one idea preyed so heavily on her mind that it swept all other thoughts before it?

Be this as it may, from the hour that terrible deception was made known to Madame Gosner, the woman was lost in the patriot. In gaining freedom for her husband, she took upon herself the gigantic task of giving liberty to France. This spirit animated her whole being; it inflamed her speeches, it aroused her in the dead of night, and filled her dreams with burning pictures of liberty. She had but two possessions left—her own talents and her daughter. In the depths of her soul she devoted both to her country. All hopes of individual happiness became a thing of the past to her.

With Monsieur Jacques the ideas of liberty, as they were given forth to the people, like an inspiration from the tongue and pen of Mirabeau, had consolidated themselves into a passion; but, like Mirabeau, he still clung to the monarchy, and hoped to liberalize France, by making its king the enemy of his own power. Brought up and educated as he had been, day by day, with his foster-brother, sharing the same lessons, caressed by the same motherly hand, he could not, all at once, yield up the traditions of a superior race to which, by implication and experience he almost belonged. It was in vain that he took upon himself the habits of the people, that he lived in a garret, and gave up the income of a little property which he had inherited from his own parents, to swell the extravagance of his foster-brother. A neglected toilet, unwashed hands, and coarse clothing, were insufficient to brutalize this man into one of the monsters that baptized themselves patriots.

Notwithstanding his moderation, and his wish to save the monarchy, and give freedom to the people at the same time, Monsieur Jacques went hand-in-hand with Madame Gosner, and threw himself into this fearful work with equal energy and unswerving determination. He, too, believed that a wicked deception had been practiced upon a long-suffering woman, and could find no way of accounting for it which did not implicate the King and Queen of France. Sometimes, when he thought of the honest, kind face of Louis the Sixteenth, of the simplicity of his words, the shy gentleness of his manner, this belief became almost an impossibility to him. Nor could he think of the queen, so earnest, so generous and beautiful, without recoiling in his heart and reason from the thought that she could have known and sanctioned an act so full of dishonor, so bitterly cruel.

But the fact still remained, no matter where the blame lay. A terrible wrong had been done, a human life worse than sacrificed. More than this, out of that awful place one soul had made its cries of agony heard; but how many others lay in those vaults, unknown. Those awful walls, with their seven feet in thickness, were built thus massively, that the cries of human anguish might never penetrate them. What became of the hundreds on hundreds who had crossed that draw-bridge, never to be heard of again? Had they been carried out in the silence of midnight to unknown graves, or were they still chained to those reeking walls, and crouching in cells so far beneath the earth that they possessed all the horrors of a grave, without its peacefulness?

The fire spread. Mirabeau heard the story from his foster-brother, and thundered it through the clubs. It burned like a romance on his lips, and glowed out in words of fire on the pages of his journal. In less than three days all Paris was in a storm of indignation, and poured itself tumultuously into the streets. If human ingenuity could have imagined anything more terrible than the horrors of that man’s fate, the passions of an ignorant people would have invented something more awful than the truth; but here the bitterest passion failed, and the simple fact was far more powerful than exaggeration ever could have been.

Monsieur Jacques told the story, and in his own stirring language described the scenes he had himself witnessed in the Bastille. Madame Gosner pleaded with a woman’s pathos and a man’s power for the husband who had been torn from her in his youth, and was now perishing in the cells of that hideous prison. All the terrible traditions of the old kingly fortress were nothing to the story of this man, as it came from the lips of his wife.

Through the work-shops, the markets, the quays, and the clubs, the fact of a man’s incarceration, after a pardon had been granted, and his death proclaimed, sped like fire along a train of powder.

The reckless demagogues, who had been so long striving to fire the people into a fiendish spirit of revolt, saw in all this an element of revolution stronger than their eloquence, and seized upon it with sharp energy. The clubs arose at once, uniting in one grand effort; but it was in answer to a clamorous demand from the people, who, ready for revolution, called aloud for guides and leaders.