The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty

“Oh, I abandon the nobility to you, count, or rather it threw itself away in the night of the fourth of August; but the royalty must be saved as the national palladium.”

“Big words, my dear Gilbert: but did the palladium save Troy? Do you believe it will be easy to save the realm with such a king?”

“But in short he is the descendant of a grand race.”

“Eagles that have degenerated into parrots. They have been marrying in and out till they are rundown.”

“My dear sorcerer,” said Gilbert, rising and taking up his hat, “you frighten me so that I must haste and take my place by the King.”

Cagliostro stopped him in making some steps towards the door.

“Mark me, Gilbert,” he said, “you know whether I love you or not and if I am not the man to expose myself to a hundred sorrows to aid you to avoid one – well, take this piece of advice: let the King depart, quit France, while it is yet time. In a year, in six months, in three, it will be too late.”

“Count, do you counsel a soldier to leave his post because there is danger in his staying?”

“If the soldier were so surrounded, engirt, and disarmed that he could not defend himself: if, above all, his life exposed meant that of half a million of men – yes, I should bid him flee. And you yourself, Gilbert, you shall tell him so. The King will listen to you unless it is all too late. Do not wait till the morrow but tell him to-day. Do not wait till the afternoon but tell him in an hour.”

“Count, you know that I am of the fatalist school. Come what come may! so long as I shall have any hold on the King it will be to retain him in France, and I shall stay by him. Farewell, count: we shall meet in the action: perhaps we shall sleep side by side on the battlefield.”

“Come, come, it is written that man shall not elude his doom however keen-witted he may be,” muttered the magician: “I sought you out to tell you what I said, and you have heard it. Like Cassandra’s prediction it is useless, but remember that Cassandra was correct. Fare thee well!”

“Speak frankly, count,” said Gilbert, stopping on the threshold to gaze fixedly at the speaker, “do you here, as in America, pretend to make folk believe that you can read the future?”

“As surely, Gilbert,” returned the self-asserted undying one, “as you can read the pathway of the stars, though the mass of mankind believe they are fixed or wandering at hazard.”

“Well, then – someone knocks at your door.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me his fate: when he shall die and how?”

“Be it so,” rejoined the sorcerer, “let us go and open the door to him.”

Gilbert proceed towards the corridor end, with a beating of the heart which he could not repress, albeit he whispered to himself that it was absurd to take this quackering as serious.

The door opened. A man of lofty carriage, tall in stature, and with strong-will impressed on his lineaments, appeared on the sill and cast a swift glance on Dr. Gilbert not exempt from uneasiness.

“Good day, marquis,” said Cagliostro.

“How do you do, baron?” responded the other.

“Marquis,” went on the host as he saw the caller’s gaze still settled on the doctor, “this is one of my friends, Dr. Gilbert. Gilbert, you see Marquis Favras, one of my clients. Marquis, will you kindly step into my sitting-room,” continued he as the two saluted each other, “and wait for a few seconds when I shall be with you.”

“Well?” queried Gilbert as the marquis bowed again and went into the parlor.

“You wished to know in what way this gentleman would die?” said Cagliostro with an odd smile; “have you ever seen a nobleman hanged?”

“Noblemen are privileged not to die by hanging.”

“Then it will be the more curious sight; be on the Strand when the Marquis of Favras is executed.” He conducted his visitor to the street door, and said: “When you wish to call on me without being seen and to see none but me, push this knob up and to the left, so – now, farewell – excuse me – I must not make those wait who have not long to live.”

He left Gilbert astounded by his assurance, which staggered him but could not vanquish his incredulity.

CHAPTER V
THE CANDLE OMEN

IN the meantime the Royal Family had continued their road to Paris. The pace was so slow and delayed that it was six o’clock before the carriage containing so much sorrow, hatred, passions and innocence, arrived at the city bars.

During the journey the Dauphin had complained of being hungry. There was no want of bread as many of the pikes and bayonets were holding up loaves and the Queen would have asked Gilbert to get one, if he had been by. She could not ask the mob, whom she held in horror.

“Wait till we are in the Tuileries Palace this evening,” she said, hugging the boy to her.

“But these men have plenty,” he protested.

“But that is theirs, not ours. And they went all the way to Versailles for it as there was none in Paris, these three days.”

“Have they not eaten for three days?” said the Prince. “Then they must be awful hungry, mamma.”

Etiquet ordered him to address his mother as Madam, but he was hungry as a poor boy and he called her mamma as a poor boy would his mother.

Ceasing to grieve, he tried to sleep. Poor royal babe, who would cry many times yet for bread before he died.

At the bars a halt was made, not to repose but to rejoice over the arrival. It was hailed with song and dance. A strange scene almost as terrifying in this joy as the others had been for ghastliness.

The fishmarket-women got off their horses, captured from the slain Lifeguardsmen, hanging their swords and carbines to the horns. Other women and the market-girls jumped off their cannon, which appeared in their alarming smoothness.

They all joined hands and danced around the royal carriage. Separating it from the deputies and the National Guard, an omen of what was to follow. This round dance had the good intention to set the enforced guests at ease: the men and women capered, kissed, hugged and sang together. The men lifted up their partners as in Teniers’ pictures.

This went on as night was falling, on a dark and rainy day, so that the dancing by the light of torches and the gun-stocks and fireworks, took fantastic effects of light and shade almost infernal.

After half an hour all shouted a general hurrah; all the firearms were shot off at risk of shooting somebody; and the bullets came down in the puddles with a sinister plash.

The prince and his sister wept; they were too frightened to feel hungered.

At the City Hall a line of troops prevented the crowd from entering the place. Here the Queen perceived her foster-brother, and confidential servant, Weber, an Austrian who had followed her fortunes from home, and was trying to pass the cordon and go in with her. To be more useful to the Queen he had put on a National Guard uniform and added the insignia of a staff-officer. The Royal Groom had lent him a horse. Not to excite suspicion he kept at a distance during the journey. Now he ran up at her call.

“What have you come for?” she demanded; “you will be useless here while at the Tuileries you will be needed. If you do not go on before, nothing will be ready for our accommodation.”

“Capital idea that,” said the King.

The Queen had spoken in German and the King had replied in English as he did not speak the other tongue though understanding it.

The bystanders held foreign tongues in horror, and they murmured and this swelled to a roar when the square opened and let the coach roll through.

The welcoming speech was made by Billy, Mayor of Paris, who played the King a scurvy trick by repeating his answer: “I always come with pleasure and confidence among my good people of Paris,” without the word “confidence” which spoilt matters, and he was taken to task by the Queen for it.

It was not till ten o’clock that the royal carriage got back to the Tuileries where Weber had done the best he could for them.

Count Provence had gone to Luxembourg Palace.

Weber had located the Royal Family in Countess Lamarck’s rooms, but the comforts were limited. For instance there was no room for Countess Charny at supper and she talked of spending the night in a chair for want of a bed. But knowing the great favor in which the Queen held the countess, they placed a couch for her in the next room to the Queen’s.

The latter shuddered at this for she thought of the count being with his wife, and Andrea saw the emotion.

“There must be some corner for me elsewhere,” said she; “I will go find it.”

“You are right, countess,” said the King while Marie Antoinette mumbled something unintelligible. “We will do something better to-morrow.”

The King watched the stately countess go out, while he held the plate to his mouth.

“That lady is a delightful creature,” he said, “and Charny ought to be happy to find such a phoenix at court.”

The Queen leant back in her chair to hide her sensation, not from the speaker, but from his sister Elizabeth, who was frightened lest she had fallen ill.

The Queen did not breathe at ease till alone in her room.

She had heard her daughter say her prayers, speaking a little longer than usual as she was pleading for her brother who had gone to rest forgetting to say his.

Sitting alone at a table, somehow she had the panorama of her life pass before her.

She recalled that she was born on the second of November, 1755, the day of the Lisbon earthquake, which swallowed up fifty thousand souls and extended five thousand miles.

She recalled that the room she slept in, in France, at Strasburg, represented the Massacre of the Innocents and so frightened her in the flickering lamplight that she had always retained a terrible memory of her first night on French soil.

She recalled how, stopping at Taverney House, she had been shown in the gardens by Baron Balsamo the image of an unknown instrument for decapitation: this was the man who, under the name of Cagliostro, had exercised a fatal influence on her destiny, as witness his hand in the Queen’s Necklace trial; though she was advised that he had perished in the papal dungeons as a magician and atheist, had she not seen him this day in the mob during the halt at Sevres?

She recalled that in Madam Lebrun’s portrait she had unwittingly made her pose as the unfortunate Henrietta Maria of England, in her portrait, as Wife of Charles I. the Beheaded.

She recalled how, when she got out of her coach for the first time at Versailles, in that Marble Court where so much blood lately flowed on her behalf, a lightning stroke had flashed so extraordinarily that Marshal Richelieu had said: “An evil omen!” albeit he was a cynic not easily startled by superstition.

She was recalling all this when a reddish cloud, from her eyes being strained, thickened around her, and one of the four candles in the candelabrum went out without evident cause.

While she was looking at it, still smoking, it seemed to her that the next taper to it paled sensibly, and turning red and then blue in the flame, faded away and lengthened upward, as if to quit the wick, from which it leaped altogether. It was extinguished, as though by an unseen breath from below.

She had watched the death of this with haggard eyes and panting bosom, and her hands went out towards the candlestick proportionable to the eclipse. When gone out, she closed her eyes, drew back in her armchair, and ran her hand over her forehead, streaming with perspiration.

When she opened them anew, after ten minutes, she perceived that the flame of the third candle was affected like the rest.

She believed it was a dream or that she was under some hallucination. She tried to rise but seemed nailed to her chair. She wanted to call her daughter, whom she would not have aroused a few minutes before for a second crown, but her voice died away in her throat. She tried to turn her head but it was rigid as if the third light expiring attracted her eyes and breath. Like the other pair, it changed hue and swaying to one side and the other, finally shot itself out.

Then fear had such mastery that speech returned to her and that made her feel restored in courage.

“I am not going to distress myself because three candles happened to go out,” she said; “but if the fourth suffers the same fate, then woe is me!”

Suddenly, without going through the transitions of the others, without lengthening or fluttering to left or right as if the death-angel wing had wafted it, the fourth flame went out.

She screamed with terror, rose, reeled and fell to the floor.

At this appeal the door opened and Andrea, white and silent in her night-wrapper appeared like a ghost on the sill. When she had revived her mistress with the mechanical action of one impelled by sheer duty, the Queen remembered all the presage, and aware that it was a woman beside her, flung her arms round her neck, and cried:

“Save me, defend me!”

“Your Majesty needs no defense among her friends,” said Andrea, “and you appear free of the swoon in which you fell.”

“Countess Charny,” gasped the other, letting go of her whom she had embraced, and almost repelling her in the first impulse.

Neither the feeling nor the expression had escaped the lady. But she remained motionless to impassibility.

“I shall undress alone,” faltered the Queen. “Return to your room, as you must require sleep.”

“I shall go back, not to sleep but to watch over your Majesty’s slumber,” returned Andrea, respectfully curtseying to the other and stalking away with the solemn step of a vitalized statue.

CHAPTER VI
THE REVOLUTION IN THE COUNTRY

OUR intention being to temporarily abandon the fortunes of our high and mighty characters to follow those of more humble but perhaps no less engaging heroes, we take up with Sebastian Gilbert whom his father, immediately after his release from the Bastile, confided to a young peasant named Ange Pitou, foster-brother of the youth, and despatched them to the latter’s birthplace, Villers Cotterets.

It was eighteen leagues from the city, and Gilbert might have sent them down by stage-coach or his own carriage; but he feared isolation for the son of the mesmerists’ victim, and nothing so isolates a traveler as a closed carriage.

Ange Pitou had accepted the trust with pride at the choice of the King’s honorary physician. He travelled tranquilly, passing through villages trembling with the thrill from the shock of the events at Paris as it was the commencement of August when the pair left town.

Besides Pitou had kept a helmet and a sabre picked up on the battlefield where he had shown himself more brave than he had expected. One does not help in the taking of a Bastile without preserving some heroic touch in his bearing subsequently.

Moreover he had become something of an orator; he had studied the Classics and he had heard the many speeches of the period, scattered out of the City Hall, in the mobs, during lulls in the street fights.

Furnished with these powerful forces, added to by a pair of ponderous fists, plenty of broad grins, and a most interesting appetite for loiters-on who did not have to pay the bill, Pitou journeyed most pleasantly. For those inquisitive in political matters, he told the news, inventing what he had not heard, Paris having a knack that way which he had picked up.

As Sebastian ate little and spoke hardly at all, everybody admired Pitou’s vigorous paternal care.

They went through Haramont, the little village where the mother of one and the nurse of the other had died and was laid in earth.

Her living home, sold by Pitou’s Aunt Angelique, her sister-in-law, had been razed by the new owner, and a black cat snarled at the young men from the wall built round the garden.

But nothing was changed at the burying-ground; the grass had so grown that the chances were that the young peasant could not find his mother’s grave. Luckily he knew it by a slip of weeping willow, which he had planted; while the grass was growing it had grown also and had become in a few years a tolerable tree.

Ange walked directly to it, and the pair said their prayers under the lithe branches which Pitou took in his arms as they were his mother’s tresses.

Nobody noticed them as all the country folk were in the field and none seeing Pitou would have recognized him in his dragoon’s helmet and with the sword and belt.

At five in the afternoon they reached their destination.

While Pitou had been away from Haramont three years, it was only as many weeks since he quitted Villers Cotterets, so that it was simple enough that he should be recognized at the latter place.

The two visitors were reported to have gone to the back door of Father Fortier’s academy for young gentlemen where Pitou had been educated with Sebastian, and where the latter was to resume his studies.

A crowd collected at the front door where they thought Pitou would come forth, as they wanted to see him in the soldier’s appurtenances.

After giving the doctor’s letter and money for the schooling to Abbé Fortier’s sister, the priest being out for a walk with the pupils, Pitou left the house, cocking his helmet quite dashingly on the side of his head.

Sebastian’s chagrin at parting was softened by Ange Pitou’s promise to see him often. Pitou was like those big, lubberly Newfoundland dogs who sometimes weary you with their fawning, but usually disarm you by their jolly good humor.

The score of people outside the door thought that as Pitou was in battle array he had seen the fights in Paris and they wanted to have news.

He gave it with majesty; telling how he and Farmer Billet, their neighbor, had taken the Bastile and set Dr. Gilbert free. They had learnt something in the Gazettes but no newspaper can equal an eye-witness who can be questioned and will reply. And the obliging fellow did reply and explain and at such length that in an hour, one of the listeners suddenly remarked that he was flagging and said:

“But our dear Pitou is tired, and here we are keeping him on his legs, when he ought to go home, to his Aunt Angelique’s. The poor old girl will be delighted to see him again.”

“I am not tired but hungry,” returned the other. “I am never tired but I am always sharpset.”

Before this plain way of putting it, the throng broke up to let Pitou go through. Followed by some more curious than the rest, he proceeded to his father’s sister’s house.

It was a cottage where he would have been starved to death by the pious old humbug of an old maid, but for his poaching in the woods for something that they could eat while the superfluity was sold by her to have the cash in augmentation of a very pretty hoard the miser kept in a chair cushion.

As the door was fastened, from the old lady being out gossiping, and Pitou declared that an aunt should never shut out a loving nephew, he drew his great sabre and opened the lock with it as it were an oyster, to the admiration of the boys.

Pitou entered the familiar cottage with a bland smile, and went straight up to the cupboard where the food was kept. He used in his boyish days to ogle the crust and the hunk of cheese with the wish to have magical powers to conjure them out into his mouth.

Now he was a man: he went up to the safe, opened it, opened also his pocket-knife, and taking out a loaf, cut off a slice which might weigh a fair two pounds.

He seemed to hear Aunt Angelique snarl at him, but it was only the creak of the door hinges.

In former times, the old fraud used to whine about poverty and palm him off with cheap cheese and few flavors. But since he had left she got up little delicacies of value which lasted her a week, such as stewed beef smothered in carrots and onions; baked mutton with potatoes as large as melons; or calves-foot, decked with pickled shallots; or a giant omelet sprinkled with parsley or dotted with slices of fat pork of which one sufficed for a meal even when she had an appetite.

Pitou was in luck. He lighted on a day when Aunt Angelique had cooked an old rooster in rice, so long that the bones had quitted the flesh and the latter was almost tender. It was basking in a deep dish, black outside but glossy and attractive within. The coxcomb stuck up in the midst like Ceuta in Gibraltar Straits.

Pitou had been so spoilt by the good living at Paris that he never even reflected that he had never seen such magnificence in his relative’s house.

He had his hunk of bread in his right hand: he seized the baking dish in his left and held it by the grip of his thumb in the grease. But at this moment it seemed to him that a shadow clouded the doorway.

He turned round, grinning, for he had one of those characters which let their happiness be painted on their faces.

The shadow was cast by Angelique Pitou, drier, sourer, bonier, not bonnier, and more mean than ever.

Formerly, at this sight, Pitou would have dropped the bread and dish and fled.

But he was altered. His helmet and sword had not more changed his aspect than his mind was changed by frequenting the society of the revolutionary lights of the capital.

Far from fleeing, he went up to her and opening his arms he embraced her so that his hands, holding the knife, the bread and the dish, crossed behind her skeleton back.

“It is poor Pitou,” he said in accomplishing this act of nepotism.

She feared that he was trying to stifle her because she had caught him red-handed in plundering her store. Literally, she did not breathe freely until she was released from this perillous clasp.

She was horrified that he did not express any emotion over his prize and at his sitting in the best chair: previously he would have perched himself on the edge of a stool or the broken chair. Thus easily lodged he set to demolishing the baked fowl. In a few minutes the pattern of the dish began to appear clean at the bottom as the rocks and sand on the seashore when the tide goes out.

In her frightful perplexity she endeavored to scream but the ogre smiled so bewitchingly that the scream died away on her prim lips.

She smiled, without any effect on him, and then turned to weeping. This annoyed the devourer a little but did not hinder his eating.

“How good you are to weep with joy at my return,” he said. “I thank you, my kind aunt.”

Evidently the Revolution had transmogrified this lad.

Having tucked away three fourths of the bird he left a little of the Indian grain at the end of the dish, saying:

“You are fond of rice, my dear auntie: and, besides, it is good for your poor teeth.”

At this attention, taken for a bitter jest, Angelique nearly suffocated. She sprang upon Pitou and snatched the lightened platter from his hand, with an oath which would not have been out of place in the mouth of an old soldier.

“Bewailing the rooster, aunt?” he sighed.

“The rogue – I believe he is chaffing me,” cried the old prude.

“Aunt,” returned the other, rising majestically, “my intention was to pay you. I have money. I will come and board with you, if you please, only I reserve the right to make up the bill of fare. As for this snack, suppose we put the lot at six cents, four of the fowl and two of bread.”

“Six? when the meat is worth eight alone and the bread four,” cried the woman.

“But you did not buy the bird – I know the old acquaintance by his nine years comb. I stole him for you from under his mother and by the same token, you flogged me because I did not steal enough corn to feed him. But I begged the grain from Miss Catherine Billet; as I procured the bird and the food, I had a lien on him, as the lawyers say. I have only been eating my own property.”

“Out of this house,” she gasped, almost losing her voice while she tried to pulverize him with her gaze.

Pitou remarked with satisfaction that he could not have swallowed one grain more of rice.

“Aunt, you are a bad relative,” he said loftily. “I wanted you to show yourself as of old, spiteful and avaricious. But I am not going to have it said that I eat my way without paying.”

He stood on the threshold and called out with a voice which was not only heard by the starers without but by anybody within five hundred paces:

“I call these honest folk for witnesses, that I have come from Paris afoot, after having taken the Bastile. I was hungered and tired, and I have sat down under my only relation’s roof, and eaten, but my keep is thrown up at me, and I am driven away pitilessly!”

He infused so much pathos in this exordium that the hearers began to murmur against the old maid.

“I want you to bear witness that she is turning from her door a poor wayfarer who has tramped nineteen leagues afoot; an honest lad, honored with the trust of Farmer Billet and Dr. Gilbert; who has brought Master Sebastian Gilbert here to Father Fortier’s; a conqueror of the Bastile, a friend of Mayor Bailly and General Lafayette.”

The murmuring increased.

“And I am not a beggar,” he pursued, “for when I am accused of having a bite of bread, I am ready to meet the score, as proof of which I plank down this silver bit – in payment of what I have eaten at my own folk’s.”

He drew a silver crown from his pocket with a flourish, and tossed it on the table under the eyes of all, whence it bounced into the dish and buried itself in the rice. This last act finished the mercenary aunt; she hung her head under the universal reprobation displayed in a prolonged groan. Twenty arms were opened towards Pitou, who went forth, shaking the dust off his brogans, and disappeared, escorted by a mob eager to offer hospitality to a captor of the Bastile, and boon-companion of General Lafayette.