Adventures
of the
Comte de la Muette
during the
Reign of Terror

One morning I awoke in La Bourbe and looked across at Deputy Bertrand as he lay sprawled over his truckle-bed, his black hair like a girl’s scattered on the pillow, his eyelids glued to his flushed cheeks, his face, all blossoming with dissipation, set into the expression of one who is sure of nothing but of his own present surrender to nothingness. Beside him were his clothes, flung upon a chair, the tri-colour sash, emblematic stole of his confused ritual, embracing all; and on a nail in the wall over his head was his preposterous hat, the little carte de civisme stuck in its band.

Casimir Bertrand (one time Casimir Bertrand de Pompignan) I had known and been friendly with at Le Plessis. Later he had imbibed theories; had become successively a Lameth, a Feuillant, a Jacobin—a constitutionalist, a moderate, an extremist; had spouted in the Faubourgs and overflowed in sectional Committee rooms; had finally been elected to represent a corner of the States-General. I had known him for a pious prig, a coxcomb, a reckless bon-vivant. He was always sincere and never consistent; and now at last, in the crisis of his engaging sans-cullotism, he had persuaded me, a proscribed royalist, to take an advantage of his friendship by lodging with him. Then it was that the driving-force behind his character was revealed to me. It was militant hedonism. Like Mirabeau, he was a strange compound of energy and voluptuousness. He turned altogether on the nerves of excitement. He was like a clock lacking its pendulum, and he would crowd a dozen rounds of the dial into the space of a single hour. Such souls, racing ahead of their judgment, illustrate well the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise; and necessarily they run themselves down prematurely. Casimir was an epicure, with a palate that could joyfully accommodate itself to black bread and garlic; a sensualist, with the power to fly at a word from a hot-bed of pleasure to a dusty desert of debate. Undoubtedly in him (did I make him the mirror to my conscience), and in a certain Crépin, with whom I came subsequently to lodge, and who was of the type only a step lower in the art of self-indulgence, I had an opportunity to see reflected a very serious canker in the national constitution.

Now he opened his eyes as I gazed on him, and shut them again immediately. It was not his habit to be a slug-a-bed, and I recognised that his sleep was feigned. The days of his political influence were each pregnant of astonishing possibilities to him, and he was too finished an epicure to indulge himself with more than the recuperative measure of slumber—frothed, perhaps, with a bead of æsthetic enjoyment in the long minute of waking.

“Casimir!” I called softly; but he pretended not to hear me.

“What, my friend! the sun is shining, and the eggs of the old serpent of pleasure will be hatching in every kennel.”

He opened his eyes at that, fixed and unwinking; but he made no attempt to rise.

“Let them crack the shells and wriggle out,” he said. “I have a fancy they will be a poisonous brood, and that La Bourbe is pleasantly remote from their centres of incubation.”

“Timorous! I would not lose a thrill in this orgy of liberty.”

“But if you lost——?” he checked himself, pursed his lips, and nodded his head on the pillow.

“Jean-Louis, I saw the Sieur Julien carried to the scaffold last night. He went foaming and raving of a plot in the prisons to release the aristocrats in their thousands upon us. There is an adder to reproduce itself throughout the city! Truly, as you say, the kennels will swarm with it.”

“And many will be bitten? My friend, my friend, there is some dark knowledge in that astute head of yours. And shall I cower at home when my kind are in peril?”

“My faith! we all cower in bed.”

“But I am going out.”

“Be advised!” (He struggled quickly up on his elbow. His face bore a clammy look in the sunlight.) “Be advised and lie close in your form—like a hare, Jean-Louis—like a hare that hears the distant beaters crying on the dogs. Twitch no whisker and prick not an ear. Take solace of your covert and lie close and scratch yourself, and thank God you have a nail for every flea-bite.”

“What ails thee of this day then, morose?”

“What ails this Paris? Why, the Prussians are in Verdun, and the aristocrats must be forestalled.”

“But how, Deputy.”

“I do not know. I fear, that is all.”

“Well, there lies your sash—the talisman to such puerile emotions.”

“Return to bed, Jean-Louis. It is unwise to venture abroad in a thunderstorm.”

“It is unwiser to shelter beneath a tree.”

“But not a roof-tree. Oh, thou fool! didst thou not close thine eyes last night on a city fermenting like a pan of dough?”

“‘Et cette alarme universelle

Est l’ouvrage d’un moucheron.’”

“But go your way!” he cried, and scrambled out of bed.

He walked to the little washstand with an embarrassed air, and set to preparing our morning cup of chocolate from the mill that stood thereon.

“After all,” he said, when the fragrant froth sputtered about his nostrils, “the proper period to any exquisite sensation is death. I dread no termination but that put to an hour of abstinence. To die with the wine in one’s throat and the dagger in one’s back—what could kings wish for better?”

He handed me my cup, and sipped enjoyingly at his own.

“I am representative of a constituency,” he said, “yet a better judge of wine than of men. The palate and the heart are associated in a common bond. That I would decree the basis of the new religion. ‘Tears of Christ’!—it is a vintage I would make Tallien and Manuel and Billaud de Varennes drunk on every day.”

He laughed in an agitated manner, and glanced at me over the rim of his cup.

“Go your way, Jean-Louis,” he repeated; “and pardon me if I call it the right mule one. But you will walk it, for I know you. And eat your fill of the sweet thistle-flowers before the thorns shall stab your gullet and take all relish from the feast.”

“Casimir!” I cried in some black wonder—“this is all the language of a villain or an hysteric——!”

I paused, stared at his twitching face, took up my hat quietly, and left the room.

* * * * * * *

A little frost on a foot, or a little blood. What is the significance of either. Once the bimbelotiers of the Palais Royal used to manufacture cards of Noël, very pretty and sparkling with rime. That was before the apotheosis of the “Third [or butterfly] State”; and many a time, during the winter of ’84, I have seen poor vagrants of the chosen brood, unwitting yet of the scarlet wings developing underneath their rugged hides, ponder over the fanciful emblems in the shop windows, and then look down with wonder at their own cracked and bleeding toes. To whom, then, could the frost appeal in this dainty guise? Not surely to those who must walk with bare feet? It is all the point of view, said the philosophers. But, they added, blood is warm, and it is well to wear socks of it if you can get no other. Put these on and look again, and you will see differently.

Not just yet, perhaps; and in the meantime the king empties his private purse to buy wood for the freezing people. This will warm them into loyalty while it lasts; and they crawl out of their icy burrows, or gather up their broken limbs on the snow beds—whereinto they have been ground by the sleds and chariots of the wealthy that rush without warning down the muffled streets—to build monuments of snow to the glory of their rulers. Then by-and-by these great obelisks melt, and add their quota to the thaw that is overwhelming what the frost has spared.

The red socks! Now, on this wild Sunday of September, when the monuments that bore the names of the good king and queen are collapsed and run away some eight years, the tocsin is pealing with a clamour of triumph from the steeples; for at last the solution of the riddle has been vouchsafed to the “Third State,” and it knows that to acquire the right point of view it must wear socks, not of its own blood but of that of the aristocrats, to whom the emblems of Noël were made to appeal.

* * * * * * *

All day I felt the pulse of the people, quickening, quickening—an added five beats to every hour—with wonder, rage, and, at last, terror maniacal. Paris was threatened; hard-wrung freedom was tottering to its fall.

This Paris was a vessel of wrath on treacherous waters—manned by revolted slaves; the crew under hatches; encompassed by enemies on every side. What remained but to clear the decks for action,—every hero to his post at the vast bulwarks; every son-of-a-sea-cook to remain and poniard the prisoners lest they club their manacles and take their captors in the rear!

At two o’clock the tocsin pealed—the signal to prepare for the fray. From its first blaring stroke I ceased, it seemed, to be myself. I waived my individuality, and became as much a conscript of the rising tide of passion as a high-perched stone that the wave at last reaches and drags down with the shingle becomes a condition of the general uproar. I made, indeed, no subscription to this fanatical heat of emotion; I was simply involved in it—to go with it, and perish of it, perhaps, but never to succumb to its disordered sophistries or yield my free soul to its influence. Possibly I had a wild idea, in the midst of sinister forebodings, that a few such as I, scattered here and there, might leaven the ugly mass. But I do not know. Hemmed in by wrath and terror, thought casts its buoys and sinks into very fathomless depths.

From the Place de Grève, along Pelletier Quay; across the Ponts au Change and St Michel; westwards by the Rue St André des Arcs, where a little diversion was caused by a street-singer at whom the crowd took offence, in that he, being an insignificant buffoon, did pelt it with its classic pretentiousness, wagging his coat-tails in contempt thereof (“À bas, Pitou!” they shrieked; “we will dock thee of thy sting and put thee to buzz in a stone bottle!”—and they had him unfrocked in a twinkling and hoisted for punishment); round, with a curve to the south, into the Rue de Bussi; thence, again westwards, along the street of St Marguerite; finally, weathering the sinister cape of the Abbaye St Germain, northwards into the Rue St Benoit and up to the yard entrance of the very prison itself,—such was the long course by which I was borne, in the midst of clamour, hate, and revilings, some dreadful early scenes in the panorama of the Revolution unfolded before my eyes—scenes crudely limned by crude street artists, splashed and boltered with crimson, horrible for the ghastly applause they evoked.

I saw and I was helpless—the block about the carriages of the nonjurants—the desperate stroke at the sans-culotte that cut the knot of indecision—the crashing panels, the flying and flung priests. One damnable with a sabre split a bald head, that came wavering in my direction, like a melon, and the brains flew like its seeds. I shut my eyes and thought, Mercy is in right ratio with the hardness of the blow. Strike deep, poor guttersnipes, if you must strike at all!

Then began the “severe justice of the people.”

* * * * * * *

What was I, poor philosophic misérable, but a germ of those germs in that great artery of blood that the revolted system was endeavouring to expel. I saw numbers of my kind thrown forth and mangled in the midst of horrors unspeakable; I was borne helpless to the heart, and was rejected to fly shuddering to remote veins of the prison’s circulation, only to return by an irresistible attraction to the central terror. More than once my mad expostulations brought me into perilous notice.

“You have hard wrongs to avenge!” I shrieked; “but at least the form of pleading has been granted you!”

“And these!” cried the killers. “Blood of God! is not Bastille Maillard within there checking the tally of the accursed? Aristocrat art thou!”

They bounded from me to a fresh victim thrust that moment from the door. She came dazed into the flare of the torches—a white face with umber hair tumbled all about it. Two gloating hounds took her under the arm-pits; a third——

Ciel! pour tant de rigueur, de quoi suis-je coupable?

* * * * * * *

I do not know whither my wanderings tended, or what space of time was covered by them. Sooner or later I was always back at the Abbaye, glutting my soul with assurance of its own wreck, helpless, despite my loathing of it, to resist the attraction. What horror absorbs the moth as it circles round the flame, I thought in those recurrent moments I could understand.

Once, when I returned, an unwonted silence reigned about the place. A few vampire figures, restless, phantasmal, flitted hither and thither in the neighbourhood of the reeking shambles. But the slaughterers and the red ladies of St Michel were retired, during an interval in the examination, for refreshment. I heard the shrill buzz of their voices all down the Rue St Benoit and from the wine and lemonade shops opposite the very gates by which I stood.

I looked into the fearful yard. My God! the dead, it seemed, were phosphorescent with the rottenness of an ancient system! Here, there, on all sides they broke the darkness with blots of light like hideous glow-worms—their hundred white faces the reflectors of as many lamps.

“But it is a brave illumination!” gurgled a voice at my ear.

I glanced aside in loathing. A little old woman, whose lungs barked at every breath, stood near me. She laughed as if she would shake herself into touchwood.

“A brave illumination!” she wheezed—“the inspiration of the girl La Lune. She was dedicated to the Holy Mother; and her skirt! Oh, mon Dieu! but it was of the azure of heaven, and now it is purple as a strangled face; and it slaps on her ankles. But by-and-by she must seek purification, for she is dedicated to the holy Virgin.”

“She placed these lamps?”

“She led her sisters to the committee that sits there.” (She pointed a gnarled finger. To one side of the dreadful quadrangle a dull glow came melancholy through some tall windows.) “She complained that ladies who would fain enjoy the show were prevented by the darkness. Then to each dead aristocrat they put a lamp. That was a fine courtesy. It is not often one sees such goods brought to market.”

A wild cloud of shapes came rushing upon us with brandished weapons and a demon skirl of voices. I thought at first that I must be the object of their fury; but they passed us by, cursing and gesticulating, and drove something amongst them up the yard, and stopped and made a ring about it on the bloody stones. What was it? I had a glimpse of two petrified faces as the little mob swept by, and a queer constriction seized my heart. Then, all in a moment, I was following, crying in my soul that here was something tangible for my abased humanity to lay hold of—some excuse to indulge a passion of self-sacrifice—some claim to a lump of ice at my feet and a lamp at my head. The dead were so calm, the living so besotted. A miserly theft, I thought, to take another’s blood when one’s own gluts one’s arteries to suffocation.

I looked over the shoulders of the outermost of the group. What horrible cantrip of Fortune had consigned this old barren weed of a man, this white exotic of a girl, to a merciless handling by these demons? The two were in walking dress, and not in the déshabille of prisoners. There was a lull in the systematic progress of the butchery. Here, it would seem, was an entr’acte designed only to relieve the tedium of waiting.

A half-dozen harpies held the girl. There was a stain of red on her ripe young lip, for I think one of the beasts had struck her; but her face was stubborn with pride. In front of all the old wizened man, who had been released, ran to and fro in an agony of obsequious terror.

“Yes, yes,” he quavered, “’tis a luminous sight—an admirable show! They lie like the fallen sticks of rockets, glimmering a dying spark. Is it not so, Carinne? Little cabbage, is it not so?”

He implored her with his feverish eyes.

“They are martyrs!” cried the girl; “and you are a coward!”

“No, no!” he wailed, and wrung his hands; and “My God! she will murder me!” he shrieked.

Suddenly he saw, darted through the ring of ruffians, and caught the breast of my coat with both his hands.

“Monsieur! you have nobility in your face! Tell these good souls that I am a furious patriot and a good citizen. Monsieur, Monsieur! We walk abroad—we are involved, unwitting, in the mêlée. The girl denounces all for pigs and murderers, and, naturally, those who hear take umbrage and force us hither.”

His dry lips vibrated; he danced up and down like a gnat on a window-pane. All the time the women were volubly chattering and the men cursing and pulling. They desired, it seemed, a prologue to the second act of the tragedy; and that was bad art. But then they were as drunk as one could wish.

“Thou art nice and dainty, citoyenne!” they shrieked. “See here—thou shalt be vivandière to the brave army of avengers! Tap her an aristocrat heart and fill her a canteen that all may drink!”

The beastly proposal was not too gross for the occasion. A man lurched forward with a jeering oath, and I—I sprang to the front too, and took the hound by his gulping throat. There came a great noise about me; I did not relax my hold, and some one rushed into our midst.

“What do you here!” he cried, harshly (Casimir’s voice). “Death of God! have you orders to insult and threaten peaceable citizens who walk abroad to see the illuminations?”

With a fierce sweep of his arms he cleared all away in front of him. The act—the gesture, brought him to my side.

“Go—escape!” he whispered, frantically. “This, here, I will attend to.”

“You knew, then?” I gasped out; and he fell back from me.

But I released my hold and stood panting. I was at the moment no whit in love with life, but I dreaded by the least stubbornness to precipitate the catastrophe that threatened that half-fainting girl. Her Casimir gave his arm to in a peremptory manner. She clung to him, and he led her stumbling across the yard, the little whimpering pinch-fist scuttling in their wake. The mob spat curses after them, but—this intermezzo being no part of its programme—it respected the Deputy’s insignia of office so far as to allow him his perquisite.

Then, with a howl of fury, it turned upon me—

“Accursed! thou dost well to dispute the people’s will!”

“See his fine monseigneur hands, washed white in a bath of milk, while the peasants drank rotten water!”

“He will think to cow us with a look. He cannot disabuse himself of the tradition. Down with the dog of an aristocrat!”

“But if he is Brunswick’s courier—Brunswick that would dine in Paris on the boiling hearts of patriots!”

I was backing slowly towards the gate as they followed reviling me. What would you? I could not help others; I would take my own destinies in hand. Here, in deadly personal peril, I felt my feet on the good earth once more, and found restoration of my reason in a violence of action. There was no assistance possible. Paris this night was a menagerie, in which all beasts of prey and of burden were released from restraint to resolve for themselves the question of survival.

In a moment I turned and fled, and half-a-dozen came screaming after me. I gained the gate in advance, and sped down the Rue St Benoit. One man, lurching from a wineshop, cut at me aimlessly with a notched and bloody sabre; but I evaded him with ease, and he fell into the midst of the pursuers, retarding them a little. I reached the south-west angle of the prison, where the Place split up, like the blown corner of a flag, into many little crooked ribbons of streets, and amongst these I dived, racing haphazard, while the red-socks thudded in my wake and my heart in my ribs. Suddenly, turning a corner, I saw the narrow mouth of an alley gape to my left. Into it I went, like a touched worm into its hole, and, swallowed by the blackness, stood still. The feet pounded by; but, sooner or later, I knew the dogs must nose back to pick up the lost scent. Then they would have me nicely in a little cul de sac, like a badger in a tub.

I leaned my shoulder—to the wall, as I thought; but the wall gave to my pressure, and I stumbled and went through it with a sliding run, while something flapped to, grievously scoring my shins in its passing. I was on my feet in an instant, however, and then I saw that I had broken, by way of a swing-door, into a little dusty lobby, to one side of which was a wicket and pay-place, and thence a flight of wooden stairs ran aloft to some chamber from which flowed down a feeble radiance of light.

I pushed through the wicket (not a soul was in the place, it seemed) and went softly and rapidly up the stairs. At the top I came upon a sight that at first astounded, then inspired me.

I was in one of those salles de spectacle that were at that time as numerous in Paris as were political clubs—a wide, low room, with an open platform at its further end for musicians, and, round three of its walls, a roped-in enclosure for figures in waxwork. It was these bowelless dolls that caused me my start, and in which I immediately saw my one little chance of salvation.

I went down the row gingerly, on tiptoe. A horn lantern, slung over the stair-head, was the only light vouchsafed this thronged assembly of dummies. Its rays danced weakly in corners, and lent some of the waxen faces a spurious life. A ticket was before each effigy—generally, as I hurriedly gathered, a quite indispensable adjunct. I had my desperate plan; but perhaps I was too particular to select my complete double. Here, a button or the cut of a collar were the pregnant conditions of history. The clothes made the man, and Mirabeau had written ‘Le Tartufe’ on the strength of a flowing wig. I saw Necker personating our unhappy monarch in that fatal Phrygian cap that was like the glowing peak of a volcano; stuttering Desmoulins waving a painted twig, his lips inappropriately inseparable; the English Pitt, with a nose blown to a point; Voltaire; Rousseau; Beaumarchais—many of the notabilities and notorieties of our own times—and before the last I stopped suddenly.

I would not for the world insult the author of ‘Figaro’; but it was my distinction to be without any; and in a waxwork the ticket makes the man.

Pierre Augustin was represented pointing a Republican moral—in dress a pseudo petit-maître—at his feet a broken watch. One recalls the incident—at Versailles—when a grand seigneur requests the ex-horologist to correct his timepiece for him. “Monsieur, my hand shakes.” “Laissez donc, monsieur! you belittle your professional skill.” Beaumarchais flings the watch on the floor. “Voilà, monsieur! it is as I said!”

Now I saw my hope in this figure and (it was all a matter of moments with me) whipped it up in my arms and ran with it to the end of the platform. A flounce of baize hung therefrom to the floor, and into the hollow revealed by the lifting of this I shot the invertebrate dummy, and then scuttled back to the ropes to take its place.

There were sounds as I did so—a noise below that petrified me in the position I assumed. My heart seemed to burr like the winding-wheel of a mechanical doll. I pray M. Beaumarchais to forgive me that travesty of a dignified reproof.

A step—that of a single individual—came bounding up the stair. My face was turned in its direction. I tried to look and yet keep my eyes fixed. The dull flapping light seconded my dissemblance; but the occasion braced me like a tonic, and I was determined to strike, if need were, with all the force of the pugnacious wit I represented.

Suddenly I saw a white, fearful countenance come over the stair-head—shoulders, legs, a complete form. It was that of an ugly stunted man of fifty, whose knees shook, whose cheeks quivered like a blanc-mange. He ran hither and thither, sobbing and muttering to himself.

“Quick, quick! who?—Mirabeau? A brave thought, a magnificent thought! My God!—will they fathom it? I have his brow—his scornful air of insistence. My God, my God!—that I should sink to be one of my own puppets!”

Astounded, I realised the truth. This poltroon—the very proprietor of the show—was in my own actual case, and had hit upon a like way out of his predicament. I saw him seize and trundle the ridiculous presentment of M. Mirabeau to the room end, and then fling it hurriedly down and kick it—the insolent jackass!—under the curtain. I saw him run back and pose himself—with a fatuous vanity even in his terror—as that massive autocrat of the Assembly; and then, with a clap and a roar, I heard at last the hounds of pursuit break covert below and come yelling up the stairs.

I do not think I shook; yet it seemed impossible that they could pass me by. There were one or two amongst them I thought I recognised as Carinne’s captors; but they were all hideous, frantic shapes, elf-locked, malodorous, bestial and drunk with blood. They uttered discordant cries as they came scrambling into the room; and by a flickering at the nape of his neck I could see that my fellow-sufferer was unable to control the throaty rising of his agitation. Suddenly a horrible silence befell. One of the intruders, a powerful young ruffian of a malignant jesting humour, put his comrades back and silenced them with an arm. His bloodshot eyes were fascinating poor Mirabeau; slowly he raised a finger and pointed it at the creature. The bubbles seemed to fly up the latter’s neck as if his heart were turned into water. It was a terrible moment—then, all at once, the whole room echoed with demon laughter.

“Mother of Christ! what cunning!”

“But, my God! he is a fine libel on the king of patriots!”

“See! the works have not run down. He twitches yet from his last performance!”

“He makes himself a show to the people. He shall be given a lamp in the yard of the Abbaye.”

The figure fell upon its knees with a choking shriek.

“Messieurs! I acted upon my first instinct of preservation! I had no thought, I swear it, to insult the great or to question the majesty of the people. Messieurs, I detest aristocrats and applaud your method of dealing with them. Merci! merci! I am a poor exhibitor of waxworks; an excellent patriot and a servant of the public.”

“But that is true!” cried a voice from the stairs. “This is little Tic-tac, that helped to decorate the Capet’s chariot on the day of the Hôtel de Ville.”

The mob grunted over this advocate.

“But he helped a prisoner to escape.”

(Was there another, then, in the same plight as myself?)

“Messieurs! he asked the way of me, as any stranger might!”

“Malepeste! if thou tell’st us so! But thou hast dared to personate a God!”

“Messieurs, he lent his countenance to me, as ever to the unfortunate.”

The answer raised a roar of approbation.

“Comme il est fin! take thy goose-skin! and yet we must tax thee somehow.”

“Let us destroy this show that he has profaned!”

My heart seemed to shrink into itself. I suffered—I suffered; but fortunately for a few moments only.

With the words on his lips, the fellow that had spoken slashed with his sabre, over the kneeling showman’s head, amongst the staring effigies. The whistle of his weapon made me blink. What did it matter?—the end must come now.

It was not as I foresaw. The waxen head spun into the air—the figure toppled against that standing next to it—that against its neighbour—its neighbour against me. I saw what was my cue, and went down in my turn, stiffly, with a dusty flop, twisting to my side as I fell, and hoping that he whom I was bowling over in due order was rich in padding. Nevertheless I was horribly bruised.

There was a howl of laughter.

“Mor’ Dieu! but five at a blow!” cried the executioner. “This is better than the one to fifty yonder!” and he came running to read the names of those he had overturned.

“Necker! it is right that he should be pictured fallen. Pitt—Beaumarchais! ha, ha, little toad! where are those patriot muskets? in your breeches-pocket? but I will cut them out!”

Now I gave up all for lost. He stepped back to get his distance—there came a crash by the stairway, and the room was plunged in darkness. One of the mob had swung up his weapon over a figure, and had knocked out the lantern with a back-handed blow.

It is the little incidents of life that are prolific as insects. The situation resolved itself into clamour and laughter and a boisterous groping of the company down the black stairway. In a minute the place was silent and deserted.

I lay still, as yet awaiting developments. I could not forget that M. Tic-tac, as a pronounced patriot, might not honour my confidence. For my escape, it must have been as I supposed. Another victim, eluding the murderers, had drawn them off my scent, and the showman had effected yet a second cross-current. He was indeed fortunate to have kept a whole skin.

Presently I heard him softly stirring and moaning to himself.

“Misérable! to have dishonoured my rôle! Would he have succumbed thus to an accident? But I am like him—yes, I am like him, for all they may say.”

Their mockery was the wormwood in his cup. He dragged himself to his feet by-and-by, and felt his way across the room to recover his abused idol. Then I would delay no longer. I rose, stepped rapidly to the stair-head, and descended to the street. He heard me—as I knew by the terrified cessation of his breathing,—and thought me, perhaps, a laggard member of his late company. Anyhow he neither moved nor spoke.

The killers were at their work again. The agonised yells of the victims followed and maddened me. But I was secure from further pursuit, save by the dogs of conscious helplessness.

And one of these kept barking at my heel: “Carinne, that you were impotent to defend! What has become of the child?”

CHAPTER II.
CITOYENNE CARINNE.

It was my unhappiness in the black spring-time of the “Terror” to see my old light acquaintance, the Abbé Michau, jogging on his way to the Place de la Bastille. I pitied him greatly. He had pursued Pleasure so fruitlessly all his days; and into this fatal quagmire had the elusive flame at length conducted him. He sat on the rail of the tumbril—a depressed, puzzled look on his face—between innocence and depravity. Both were going the same road as himself—the harmless white girl and the besotted priest, who shrunk in terror from giving her the absolution she asked;—and poor Charles divided them.

He was not ever of Fortune’s favourites. He would make too fine an art of Epicurism, and he sinned so by rule as to be almost virtuous. I remember him with a half-dozen little axioms of his own concocting, that were after all only morality misapplied: “To know how to forget oneself is to be graduate in the school of pleasure.” “Self-consciousness is always a wasp in the peach.” “The art of enjoyment is the art of selection.” On such as these he founded his creed of conduct; and that procured him nothing but a barren series of disappointments. He was never successful but in extricating himself from mishaps. The ravissantes he sighed after played with and insulted him—though they could never debase his spirit. The dishes he designed lacked the last little secret of perfection. He abhorred untidiness, yet it was a condition of his existence; and he could not carry off any situation without looking like a thief. One further turn of the wheel, and he would have been a saint in a monastery.

I can recall him with some tenderness, and his confident maxims with amusement. That “art of selection” of his I found never so applicable as to the choice of one’s Revolutionary landlord. It was Michau’s logeur, I understand, who caused the poor Abbé to be arrested and brought before the tribunal miscalled of Liberty, where the advocacy of the chivalrous Chauveau de la Garde was sufficient only to procure him the last grace of an unproductive appeal. It was the atrocity with whom latterly I lodged who brought me to my final pass.

In truth, as the letters of apartments were largely recruited from the valetaille of émigrés, the need of caution in choosing amongst them was very real. M. le Marquis could not take flight in a panic without scattering some of his fine feathers—fortunately, indeed, for him sometimes, for they were as sops thrown to the pursuing wolves while he sped on. Then, down would grovel public accusers, police, and committee-men to snap at the fragments; and amongst them Bon-Jean, Monsieur’s valet de pied, would secure his share, perhaps, and set up house with it in one of the meaner faubourgs, and trade profitably therein upon the fears of his lodgers.

Simon Mignard was the last who had the honour to entertain me; and to that horrible little grotesque did I owe my subsequent lodgment in La Petite Force. It was a bad choice, and, with my experience, an unpardonable; but I was taken with a certain humour in the creature that put me off my judgment.

For generally, indeed, this faculty of humour I found to be antipathetic to revolution. It was to be looked upon as a mark of social degeneration. The brute “thrown back” to his primordial state is an animal that takes himself with the most laughterless gravity. He resumes himself corrupt, so to speak, as one resumes the endurance of office full of the rebellious grievance of a holiday. He returns to the primary indulgence of instinct with a debased appetite, and that sense of humour does not accompany him. This is why his prejudices have the force of convictions.

“Citizen Simon,” I said one day, “I would put it to you—if revolutionists would reconstitute society by purging the world of the abnormal, should they not offer themselves the first holocausts to their theories?”

“Hey?” he cried, peering over his glasses. His eye-slits were like half-healed wounds; his face was all covered with a grey down, as if he were some old vessel of wrath the Revolution had produced from its mustiest blood-bin in the cellars where its passions were formerly wont to ferment.

“Hey?” he cried. “But explain, Citizen Thibaut.”

“Why, obviously a primal simplicity cannot be taught by those who, by their own showing, are an essential condition of degeneration.”

“You think so, my friend? But is it not he who has hunted with the wolves can best advise the lamb whither not to stray? Set a thief to catch a thief, but not innocence to lead innocence.”

“We are all so disinterested, eh? We must kill to purify—so long as we remain the executioners.”

“The physicians! the physicians! Some day we shall provide the tonic.”

“At this rate the physicians will have to drink it themselves.”

“Meaning the patients will fail us? Rest content. They will last our time. The ills in the constitution of France are many. For the resurrection—sang Dieu!” he cried, with a wry face, “but that is no part of our programme!”

Indeed, it was not of his. He was actuated by no passion but the blood-sucker’s. One day he showed me a clumsy model guillotine, a foot high, of his own contriving. The axe was a fragment of table-knife sunk in a finger of lead, and with it he would operate upon a gruesome little doll he had with an adjustable neck. Snip! the blade fell and the head, and a spout of crimson gushed forth and stained the floor.

“That is a waste of good wine,” said I.

His face puckered like a toad’s eyelids.

“Is it not?” he chuckled, “of the brand drunk by the patriot Citoyenne Sombreuil.”

“Blood!”

“Voyez!” he cried, with a little shriek of laughter. “It is hollow. Often I fill it from the tap in the Place de la Bastille. My faith, what a fountain! I love it like Dantzic brandy.”

Then it was I found his humour a little excessive to my taste; and I severed my connection with him. He might lie; obviously he did, in fact, about the blood; but one’s sympathies could not embrace so stupid a falsehood. Promptly he denounced me to his section. I had given him the courteous “you,” said he, and amongst my effects was a box of the interdicted hair-powder.

But it is of my earlier landlord, Jacques Crépin, who for a time influenced my fortunes quite admirably, that I desire here to speak.

Upon this rascal I happened on the evening of Lepelletier St Fargeau’s murder in Février’s Coffee-house. It was the interminable week of the votings on the king’s sentence. During the course of it I had many times visited the Hall of Convention, had stayed a while to watch the slow chain of Deputies hitching over the Tribune, with their dreary chant, “La Mort,” that was like the response to an endless litany of fatality intoned by the ushers; had heard the future Dictator, spectacled, marmoset-faced, irrepressible in oratory, drone his sour dithyrambics where a word would have sufficed; had fallen half asleep over the phantom scene, and had imagined myself at the Comédie Française during a performance of “Les Victimes Cloîtrées”—a dreamy fancy to which the incessant sound of feet on boards, high up in the “Mountain” quarter, the reverberating clap of doors, the wide patter of voices and tinkle of laughter from bedizened chères amies, pricking down the ayes and noes upon scented cards, the shriller brabble of Mère Duchesse aloft with her priestesses of the Salpêtrière, and the intermittent melodramatic drawl of the actors moving across the stage, gave colour and coherence.

By then, I think, I was come to be graduate in Michau’s school of Pleasure. It was impressed upon me that to think of myself was a little to foretaste my probable martyrdom. It was philosophy more congenial to read in the serene patriot Thibaut a disinterested sheep fattening on the grass about the abattoir. My title was a plague-spot to cover; little but the dust of my patrimony remained; I had long disabused my mind of the dogma that manliness is necessarily a triumphant force in the world.

Yet, a month before, I had been conscious of a little run of pity, that was like a sloughing of the old wound of nobility. It was to see the figure of him I had called Sire heavily seated in that same Salle de Manège, his attire, appropriately, a drab surtout—the colour of new-turned mould—his powdered hair blotted with a tonsure where he had leaned his weary head back for rest, that lost look on his ineffectual face—“Messieurs! this strange indignity! But doubtless the saints will explain to me of what I am accused.”

Bah! have I not learned the “Rights of Man,” and seen them illustrated, too, on those days of the “severe justice of the people.” The worse the decomposition below, the thicker will be the scum that rises to the top. But there the wholesome air shall deodorise it by-and-by, and the waters of life be sweet to the taste again—for a time. And in the meanwhile I browse by the abattoir.

On that Saturday evening, the last of the voting, I dined with distinction at Février’s in the Palais Royal. I could still afford, morally and materially, this little practice of self-indulgence; for they had not yet begun to make bread of dried pease, and many of the ardent Deputies themselves were admirable connoisseurs in meat and wine.

While I was sitting—the whole place being in a ferment of scurry and babble—a couple, who awakened my curious interest, entered and took a vacant table next to mine. A withered old man it was and a young girl, who sauntered with ample grace in his wake.

The first came down the room, prying hither and thither, bowelless and bent like a note of interrogation. He was buttoned up to the throat in a lank dark-green surtout, and his plain hat was tilted back from his forehead, so as to show his eyebrows, each lifted and lost in the creases of a dozen arched wrinkles, and the papery lids beneath them bulging and half closed. His face was all run into grey sharpness, but a conciliatory smile was a habit of his lips. He carried his hands behind his back as if they were manacled there.

The girl who followed was in features and complexion cold and beautiful. Her eyes were stone-grey under well-marked brows; her forehead rounded from her nose like a kitten’s; the curls that escaped from beneath her furred hood were of a rich walnut brown. She had that colourless serenity in her face that is like snow over perfumed flowers. Gazing on such, one longs to set one’s heart to the chill and melt it and see the blossoms break.

Now I had at once recognised in this couple the sustainers of the principal rôles in a certain September tragedy entr’acte. In these times of feverish movement the manner in which Casimir had secured their escape was indeed an old story with me; yet, seeing them again under these vastly improved circumstances, and remembering in what way I had sought to assist them, my heart was moved beyond its present custom to a feeling of sympathetic comradeship with one, at least, of the two.

The old man chose his table.

“Sit down, wench,” said he. “My faith! we must dine, though crowns fall.”

She took her seat with a little peevish sigh.

“Though the stars fell in the street like hail, you would dine,” she said.

He cocked his head sideways.

“They have fallen, my Carinne. The ruin of them litters the Temple.”

She said doggedly, “Vive le roi!” under her breath.

“My God!” he whispered, and called the waiter.

He eyed her askance and nervously as the man came. Some distraught admiration seemed to mingle with his apprehension of her. She sat languid and indifferent, and even closed her eyes, with a little disdainful smile, as he leaned down to her and ran his finger eagerly over the various items of the bill of fare.

“Ostend oysters, carp fried in milk, sweetbread patty—that is good. Ragout of the kidneys and combs of cocks—that is very good—Carinne, see! the ragout! Holy saints, but my pocket! Slice of calf’s head, turtle fashion—girl, are you listening? Be reckless. Take of all if you will. I bid thee—thy little uncle, ma mie. Slice of—Carinne, this is better than the cabbages and fried eggs of Pierrettes. I will not care—I will not. Though I have to cut down trees to meet it, the palate shall have its holiday. Slice of—mon Dieu, Carinne! I ate of it once before in this very house. It melts like the manna of the Israelites. It does not surfeit, but it forms an easy bed for the repose of ecstasies more acute.”

The girl broke in with a little high-flung laugh.

“Not trees, but a forest,” she said. “There—choose for me. I am indifferent.”

“Indifferent! indifferent?—Oh, undeserving of the fine gifts of the gods!”

He turned to the waiter, his eyes still devouring the carte, his lips silently busy with its contents. Presently he gave his order, sat down, and remained fixedly gnawing a finger, his face set half in enjoying contemplation, half in a baffled aggravation of selection.

In only one other direction did the couple appear to arouse curiosity. The great nerve of the town was all charged with a leaping electricity, and citizens, staid enough ordinarily, ate now and drank under an excitement they could barely control.

But, over against me, at a little distance, were two men seated at a table; and of these one seemed to take a like interest with mine in my neighbours.

This individual, unmoved, apparently, by the general ferment, had finished his dinner and sat sipping his Médoc luxuriously. He was a pimple-faced man, well-nourished and sensual-looking, but with an air of tolerant geniality about him. Ugly as Danton, he had yet a single redeeming ornament in the shape of a quantity of rich auburn hair that fell from his head in natural curls. Though his condition was plain to me, and I saw that the restaurateur treated him with obsequious deference, he appeared more self-complacent than self-sufficient, and as if he were rather accustomed to indulge than abuse his position. For I recognised in him the president of some sectional committee, and that by the little plaque, printed small with the Rights of Man, that hung as a pendant from his tricolour neck-ribbon.

Of the other at the table I took but little notice, save to remark that he devoured his meal with the air of a man to whom good digestion is no essential condition of politics.

Now, of a sudden, Jacques Crépin of the pendant lowered his legs, took up his bottle and glass, and, to my extreme surprise, crossed the room to my table and sat down by me.

He did not speak at first, being engaged in watching our neighbours, before whom were placed at the moment the dishes of the uncle’s selection.

Mademoiselle Carinne gave a little Ouf! over hers.

“But what is this?” she said.

“It is a pig’s foot à la St Menehould. Such a dish, babouine!”

The old rascal had taken advantage of her insensibility to procure her one of the cheapest entries on the list.

She pushed it from her with an exclamation of disgust.

“Fie, then!” she cried. “The very hoof of a filthy swine! Wouldst thou have me make my hunger a footstool to a pig? Take it away. I will not touch it!”

He protested, voluble and shamefaced. She would not listen. Out of mere wilfulness she now selected the most expensive item of the menu—a partridge stewed in wine. He seemed like to cry; but she persisted and gained her point.

“We shall be ruined!” he cried, inconsistently enough. “For a month after our return we shall have to live on bread and boiled nettles.”

“In December, mon oncle? Then I am imperious for white wine of Mont Raché.”

The old fellow almost shrieked.

“Carinne! Eight francs the bottle! Consider, my niece. I shall die in Sainte Pélagie!”

The new-comer turned to me with a grin.

“Didst ever hear the like?” said he.

I nodded gravely. I was not then all inured to impertinence.

“He lacks the art of selection,” I said coldly, thinking of Michau.

He showed himself good-humouredly conscious of my manner. He leaned towards me and murmured carelessly—

“There, of a truth, speaks Monseigneur le Comte de la Muette.”

I reached for my glass and sipped from it; but I have no doubt my hand shook.

“The citizen does not recognise me?”

“No, by my faith.”

“I am Jacques Crépin; and formerly I served where I now dine.”

I glanced at him. Some faint remembrance of the fellow woke in me.

“M. le Comte,” he went on, in the same low voice, “once rewarded me with a handsome vail for some trifling service. It was the lucky louis-d’or of my fortunes. Here was a little of the means; the Revolution was my opportunity. Now the masters serve the waiters. I devour with my teeth what I once devoured with my eyes. You see me president of a section; but, pardieu! I have no quarrel with aristocrats of a fastidious palate. It was the contemplation of such educated me to a right humour in gastronomy. I am indebted to monsieur for many a delicate hint in selection.”

Again I thought of the poor Michau.

“I am honoured,” I said. “And so, M. Crépin, this is the goal of your high republicanism?”

“My faith!” he said, with a generous chuckle, “I acknowledge it. I have existed forty years that I may live one—perhaps no more. To drink and to eat and to love en prince—I have the capacity for it and the will. I have nursed my constitution on broken scraps. This fesse-Mathieu here offends me. Had I a fortune, I would fling it away on a single desired dish if necessary. We have waived the right to think of the morrow. But, how is monsieur known?”

“They call me Citizen Thibaut.”

“Citizen Thibaut, I drink to our better acquaintance. This Médoc—I have not grudged it you in former years. Your refined appreciation of it has many a time glorified to me my supper of stale fragments. But for you, maybe, I had not learned the secret of its fragrance. To my past master in epicurism I gulp a grateful toast.”

He was as good as his word.

“Citizen Crépin,” I said, “where do you live?”

“Rue de Jouy, St Antoine,” he answered.

“I seek a convenient landlord. Will you accommodate me?”

“With all my heart.”

I heard the vieillard at the next table gobble and choke. I turned my head to look, sprang to my feet, and my glass crashed on the boards.

In that instant the room had leaped into uproar—for something immediate, swift, and terrible had happened. It was this:

The fast-eating man at the table opposite, having finished his dinner, was risen to pay his bill. He stood with impatient hand outstretched as Février fumbled in his pocket for the change; and at the moment a fellow, thick-set, stubble-bearded, dressed in a blouse and faded cloak, strode up the room and paused by him.

“Are you Deputy Lepelletier?” said he.

The diner turned and nodded.

“You have voted in this affair of the king?”

“Mais oui,” said the other—“for death.”

“Scélérat—prends ca!” and with the word he whipped a long blade from under his cloak and passed it into the body of the deputy. I saw the flash and heard the piteous bleat, as also, I swear, the sound of the flesh sucking to the steel.

Février snatched at the murderer, and was spun to the floor like a skittle. I saw startled figures rise, chairs and tables totter, and the one bounding amongst them. He got clear away.

Then, as the mob closed about the fallen, moaning shape, I turned with an instinct of horror to view of my neighbours.

The old gourmet had flung himself back in his chair, his face twisted from the sight; but mademoiselle still picked daintily at her partridge.

CHAPTER III.
THE FOOTPAD.

Early in June of the year ’93 I left Paris in company with M. Crépin. At that time in the flower of his, somewhat mediocre, fortunes, he had been intrusted with a mission which was entirely after his own heart. He was to represent the Executive, in fact, in a “sequestrating” tour through Limosin and Guienne,—or rather through the new-found departments that had deposed those ancient territories,—and his interest had procured me a post as his clerk or assistant. What duties this embraced perhaps the Government would have found it as difficult to specify as their sub-agent; but, after all, Jacques Bonhomme emancipated was excessively conservative in the matter of his retention of the system of complimentary sinecures. For myself, I looked upon my appointment as the simple means to postpone an inevitable denunciation.

Crépin and I had by then ceased to fraternise. I could never quite learn to adapt my sympathies to a certain mauvais ton that underlay in him all the sensitiveness of the voluptuary. Also, perhaps, I was beginning a little to resent the humourless methods of a destiny that had not the wit, it seemed, to rebuke my innate luxuriousness but by affecting a concern to accommodate me with house-fellows of my own kidney. We parted on the best of terms; and he none the less attended to my interests and, as far as possible, to my safety. To the end, I think, he retained an admiration for the superior quality of my epigastrium; and when his opportunity came to do me a service, he never failed to remind me of his indebtedness to my fastidious gourmandise.

We left the city, travelling en roi, on a fine blowing afternoon. We had our roomy carriage, with four well-blooded horses, and a postilion to each pair. An escort of four patriots, moreover, mounted, armed, and generally drunk, accompanied us to enforce the letter of the law. We went out by the suburb of Passy, starting from the Pavillon-Liberté, close by the Thuilleries,—where Crépin received his papers of administration—and whipping along the river-bank by way of the Port aux Pierres. Close by the gates the carriage gave a thudding jolt, and drew up suddenly to an accompaniment of noise like the screaming of a swollen axle.

I started up in my corner.

“What is it?” I exclaimed; but three men, risen at that moment from a bench under some chestnut-trees, engaged my surprised attention. They made at the postilions, it seemed, and the face of him that was foremost twitched with a rage of nervous resentment. Their hats had been laid beside them in the shade, and I noticed that as this individual sprang to his feet, the powder leapt from his head as if a musket-ball had struck it. For he was very sprucely groomed, every hair currycombed to run parallel with its fellows; and there was a fastidious neatness about his appearance that was like the peevish delicacy of an invalid.

Such, indeed, he was, from more than one point of view; for he was no other than M. Robespierre himself, dressed in the fine blue coat he was studying to make historical, and exhibiting the weak extremes of his nature in presence of a run-over dog.

“But this is infamous!” I heard him shrill, in a strained wavering voice. “Thus to shock our humanity and our nerves!”

He ran to the carriage window in uncontrollable excitement. He bustled with his shaking speech so that it was hardly audible.

“What mischief produces itself that you tear through the streets like brigands? Messieurs—messieurs! but I say you have no right—citizens, do you hear?”

Crépin, dismayed, muttered something about authority. The other snapped at the word and worried it.

“Authority! there is none in this city to be careless of innocent lives. Authority! who excuses himself to me—to the Republic—by assuming a licence to murder under its ægis,—yes, murder, I say? You would adopt the prerogatives of aristocrats—you are an aristocrat—Tachereau! St Just!”

He was beside himself. His lean hands picked at the window-frame. All the time the poor cur in the road was screeching, and the sound seemed to jar him out of his self-control. One of his companions stepped up to him, put a hand upon his arm, and drew him away. Quite a little mob had gathered about us.

“Reculez les chevaux!” said this person to the postilions. “Complete what you have begun.”

The horses backed the carriage once, and drew forward again, stilling the cries. Personally I should have preferred alighting during the operation. Robespierre ran to the trees and put his palms to his ears, doubling himself up as if he had the toothache. The other came to the window once more.

This was the “Apocalyptic!” of the Assembly, its most admirable type of fanaticism. Dark and immovable as a Nubian archer in a wall painting, he might have been represented for ever holding the taut string and the arrow that should whistle to its mark. He was young, a mere boy—melancholy, olive-skinned, beautiful in his way. Cold, incorruptible, merciless, nevertheless, he—this St Just—was yet that one of the ultra-revolutionists I could find it in me to regard admiringly. Of all, he alone acted up to the last letter of his creed of purification. Of all, he alone was willing to do a long life’s reaping without wage, without even that posthumous consideration of a niche in the “Pantheon of history.” Like the figure of Time on a clock, he was part and parcel of the scythe with which he wrought. He must move when the hour came—cutting right and left—and with the last stroke of inspiration he must stop until the wheels of being should bring him to the front once more. Truly, he was not great, but, quite possibly, necessary; and as such, one could not but exclaim over his faultless mechanism. He sacrificed his life to his cause, long before it was demanded of him, and in the end flung himself to the axe as to a kindred spirit with which his structural and destructive genius was quite in sympathy. One must acknowledge that he made a consistent practice of that which is the true art of reform—to know whom to exclude from one’s system. Only, he was a little too drastic in his exclusion; and that came from a lack of ton. For your fanatic sees a reactionary in every one whose mouth opens for what reason soever but to applaud his methods; and the sneers which his sensitiveness regards as levelled at himself, he puts to the account of treason against his policy.

“Citizen Crépin,” he said (for he had already identified my companion), “for the future, if you must ride rough-shod, I would recommend you to make the meanest your first consideration.”

“But, citizen, it was no fault of mine.”

“You have a voice to control, I presume?”—he stepped back and waved his hand. “Allez vous promener!”—and the carriage jerked forward.

I shot a glance at the other as we passed. He was retired from the scene, and he seemed endeavouring to control the agitation into which he had been betrayed; but he looked evilly from under his jumping eyelids at us as we went by.

We travelled cautiously until we were gone a long gunshot from the city walls, and then Crépin put his head out of the window and cursed on the postilions furiously.

“Savant sacré!” he cried, sinking back on the seat; “we are whipt and rebuked like schoolboys. Is a Republic a seminary for street curs? They should hoist Reason in a balloon if she is to travel. That St Just—he will make it indictable to crack a flea on one’s thumb-nail.”

“What were they doing in that quarter of the town?”

“How should I know, Citizen Thibaut? Spinning webs under the trees, maybe, to catch unwary flies. They and others spend much of each day in the suburbs. It is the custom of attorneys, as it is of story-writers, to hatch their plots in green nooks. They brood for a week that they may speak for an hour. Robespierre comes to Passy and Auteuil for inspiration. Couthon goes every day to Neuilly for bagatelle. My faith, but how these advocates make morality unattractive! A dozen lawyers amongst the elect would produce a second revolt of the angels. That is why the devil is loath to recall them.”

“To recall them?”

“They are his ambassadors, monsieur, and it is his trouble that they are for ever being handed their passports to quit such soil as he would be represented on. Then they return to him for fresh instructions; but they will not understand that human passions are not to be controlled by rule of thumb.”

“Or sounded by depth of plumb, Crépin; and, upon my word, you are a fine bailiff to your masters.”

Now, I have no wish to detail the processes of our monotonous journey into the south-westerly departments, whereto—that is to say, to the borders of Dordogne—it took us eight days to travel. We had our excitements, our vexations, our adventures even; but these were by the way, and without bearing on what I have set myself to relate.

One evening as we were lazily rolling along an empty country road, making for the little walled town of Coutras, where the fourth Henry was known to his credit once upon a time, a trace snapped, leading to more damage and a little confusion amongst the horses. I alighted in a hurry—Crépin, whose veins were congested with Bordeaux, slumbering profoundly on in his corner—and finding that the accident must cause us some small delay, strolled back along the road we had come by, for it looked beautiful in perspective. Our escort, I may say, affecting ignorance of our mishap, had rattled on into the dusk.

It was a night for love, or fairies, or any of those little gracious interchanges of soul that France had nothing the art to conceive in those years. The wind, that had toyed all day with flowers, was sweet with a languorous and desirable playfulness; a ripening girl moon sat low on a causeway of mist, embroidering a banner of cloud that blew from her hands; the floating hills were hung with blots of woodland, and to peer into the trance of sky was to catch a star here and there like a note of music.

I turned an elbow of the road and strolled to a little bridge spanning a brook that I had noticed some minutes earlier in passing. Leaning over the parapet, I saw the water swell to a miniature pond as it approached the arch—a shallow ferry designed to cool the fetlocks of weary horses. The whole was a mirror of placidity. It flowed like a white oil, reflecting in intenser accent the fading vault above, so that one seemed to be looking down upon a subterranean dawn—and, “It is there and thus,” I murmured, “the little people begin their day.”

There were rushes fringing the brook-edge, as I knew only by their sharp reversed pictures in the blanched water-glass, and a leaning stake in mid-stream repeated itself blackly that the hairy goblins below might have something to scratch themselves on; and then this fancy did so possess me that, when a bat dipt to the surface and rose again, its reality and not its shadow seemed to flee into the depths. At last a nightingale sang from a little copse hard by, completing my bewitchment—and so my thraldom to dreams was nearly made everlasting. For, it appeared, a man had come softly out of the woods behind me, while I hung over the parapet, and was stealing towards me on tiptoe with clubbed bludgeon.

It was a stag-beetle that saved my life—whereout of might be snatched many little rags of reflections; for it shot whizzing and booming past my ear and startled me to a sudden sideway jump. The fellow was almost on my back at the moment, and could not check his impetus. He came crack against the low wall, his club span out of his fist, and he himself clutched, failed, and went over with a mighty splash into the water underneath.

The ludicrous dénoûment gave me time to collect my faculties. I was at no loss for an immediate solution of the incident. The highways, in these glorious days of fraternity, were infested with footpads, and no farther than five miles out of Paris we had had trouble with them. Doubtless this rascal, the carriage being out of sight, had taken me for a solitary pedestrian.

I looked over the parapet, feeling myself master of the situation, though I had no weapon upon me. My assailant was gathering his long limbs together in the shallow pool. The water dragged the hair over his eyes and ran in a stream from his bristling chin. Suddenly he saw, drew a pistol, and clicked it at me. It was a futile and desperate action, and calculated only to confirm my estimate of his character.

“Ventrebleu and the devil!” he shouted. “Make way for me, sir.”

I waved my hand, right and left of the ferry. Should he emerge either way, I could easily forestall him.

“You have your choice of roads,” I said, politely.

He recognised his difficulty, and turned as if to wade up stream and escape by the fields. His fourth step brought him into deep water, out of which he floundered snorting.

“Try under the bridge,” I said. “It is the right passage for rats.”

He cursed me volubly.

“Well, we are one to one,” said he in sudden decision, and came splashing out on the Coutras side.

The moment he climbed up the bank I closed with him. He was fairly handicapped by his liquid load, and out of breath and of conceit with his luck besides. He aimed a blow at me with his pistol-butt, but I easily avoided it and let him topple his length again—assisting him in fact—but this time in the dust. Then I sat on him, and threatened his head with a great stone.

“Pouf!” said he, panting. “I protest I am no adept at this business.”

“Is it your only one?” said I.

“At this date, yes.”

“So—you have been an honest man? And what more can a patriot boast of?”

I whistled and called to my companions. My prisoner looked amazed.

“You are not alone!” he exclaimed.

“By no means. My escort is round the curve of the road there.”

He seemed to collapse under me.

“Merci, monsieur!” he muttered, “merci!”

Adventures of the Comte de la Muette during the Reign of Terror

Adventuresof theComte de la Muetteduring theReign of Terror

[DEDICATION.]

CONTENTS.