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BOOK III: THE SWORD CHAPTER II.
QUOS DEUS VULT PERDERE
Once again, precisely as he had done when he joined the Binet troupe, did Andre-Louis
now settle down whole-heartedly to the new profession into which necessity had driven
him, and in which he found effective
concealment from those who might seek him to his hurt.
This profession might--although in fact it did not--have brought him to consider
himself at last as a man of action.
He had not, however, on that account ceased to be a man of thought, and the events of
the spring and summer months of that year 1789 in Paris provided him with abundant
matter for reflection.
He read there in the raw what is perhaps the most amazing page in the history of
human development, and in the end he was forced to the conclusion that all his early
preconceptions had been at fault, and that
it was such exalted, passionate enthusiasts as Vilmorin who had been right.
I suspect him of actually taking pride in the fact that he had been mistaken,
complacently attributing his error to the circumstance that he had been, himself, of
too sane and logical a mind to gauge the depths of human insanity now revealed.
He watched the growth of hunger, the increasing poverty and distress of Paris
during that spring, and assigned it to its proper cause, together with the patience
with which the people bore it.
The world of France was in a state of hushed, of paralyzed expectancy, waiting
for the States General to assemble and for centuries of tyranny to end.
And because of this expectancy, industry had come to a standstill, the stream of
trade had dwindled to a trickle.
Men would not buy or sell until they clearly saw the means by which the genius
of the Swiss banker, M. Necker, was to deliver them from this morass.
And because of this paralysis of affairs the men of the people were thrown out of
work and left to starve with their wives and children.
Looking on, Andre-Louis smiled grimly.
So far he was right. The sufferers were ever the proletariat.
The men who sought to make this revolution, the electors--here in Paris as elsewhere--
were men of substance, notable bourgeois, wealthy traders.
And whilst these, despising the canaille, and envying the privileged, talked largely
of equality--by which they meant an ascending equality that should confuse
themselves with the gentry--the proletariat perished of want in its kennels.
At last with the month of May the deputies arrived, Andre-Louis' friend Le Chapelier
prominent amongst them, and the States General were inaugurated at Versailles.
It was then that affairs began to become interesting, then that Andre-Louis began
seriously to doubt the soundness of the views he had held hitherto.
When the royal proclamation had gone forth decreeing that the deputies of the Third
Estate should number twice as many as those of the other two orders together, Andre-
Louis had believed that the preponderance
of votes thus assured to the Third Estate rendered inevitable the reforms to which
they had pledged themselves.
But he had reckoned without the power of the privileged orders over the proud
Austrian queen, and her power over the obese, phlegmatic, irresolute monarch.
That the privileged orders should deliver battle in defence of their privileges,
Andre-Louis could understand.
Man being what he is, and labouring under his curse of acquisitiveness, will never
willingly surrender possessions, whether they be justly or unjustly held.
But what surprised Andre-Louis was the unutterable crassness of the methods by
which the Privileged ranged themselves for battle.
They opposed brute force to reason and philosophy, and battalions of foreign
mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas were to be impaled on bayonets!
The war between the Privileged and the Court on one side, and the Assembly and the
People on the other had begun.
The Third Estate contained itself, and waited; waited with the patience of nature;
waited a month whilst, with the paralysis of business now complete, the skeleton hand
of famine took a firmer grip of Paris;
waited a month whilst Privilege gradually assembled an army in Versailles to
intimidate it--an army of fifteen regiments, nine of which were Swiss and
German--and mounted a park of artillery
before the building in which the deputies sat.
But the deputies refused to be intimidated; they refused to see the guns and foreign
uniforms; they refused to see anything but the purpose for which they had been brought
together by royal proclamation.
Thus until the 10th of June, when that great thinker and metaphysician, the Abbe
Sieyes, gave the signal: "It is time," said he, "to cut the cable."
And the opportunity came soon, at the very beginning of July.
M. du Chatelet, a harsh, haughty disciplinarian, proposed to transfer the
eleven French Guards placed under arrest from the military gaol of the Abbaye to the
filthy prison of Bicetre reserved for thieves and felons of the lowest order.
Word of that intention going forth, the people at last met violence with violence.
A mob four thousand strong broke into the Abbaye, and delivered thence not only the
eleven guardsmen, but all the other prisoners, with the exception of one whom
they discovered to be a thief, and whom they put back again.
That was open revolt at last, and with revolt Privilege knew how to deal.
It would strangle this mutinous Paris in the iron grip of the foreign regiments.
Measures were quickly concerted.
Old Marechal de Broglie, a veteran of the Seven Years' War, imbued with a soldier's
contempt for civilians, conceiving that the sight of a uniform would be enough to
restore peace and order, took control with Besenval as his second-in-command.
The foreign regiments were stationed in the environs of Paris, regiments whose very
names were an irritation to the Parisians, regiments of Reisbach, of Diesbach, of
Nassau, Esterhazy, and Roehmer.
Reenforcements of Swiss were sent to the Bastille between whose crenels already
since the 30th of June were to be seen the menacing mouths of loaded cannon.
On the 10th of July the electors once more addressed the King to request the
withdrawal of the troops.
They were answered next day that the troops served the purpose of defending the
liberties of the Assembly!
And on the next day to that, which was a Sunday, the philanthropist Dr. Guillotin--
whose philanthropic engine of painless death was before very long to find a deal
of work--came from the Assembly, of which
he was a member, to assure the electors of Paris that all was well, appearances
notwithstanding, since Necker was more firmly in the saddle than ever.
He did not know that at the very moment in which he was speaking so confidently, the
oft-dismissed and oft-recalled M. Necker had just been dismissed yet again by the
hostile cabal about the Queen.
Privilege wanted conclusive measures, and conclusive measures it would have--
conclusive to itself.
And at the same time yet another philanthropist, also a doctor, one Jean-
Paul Mara, of Italian extraction--better known as Marat, the gallicized form of name
he adopted--a man of letters, too, who had
spent some years in England, and there published several works on sociology, was
writing: "Have a care!
Consider what would be the fatal effect of a seditious movement.
If you should have the misfortune to give way to that, you will be treated as people
in revolt, and blood will flow."
Andre-Louis was in the gardens of the Palais Royal, that place of shops and
puppet-shows, of circus and cafes, of gaming houses and brothels, that universal
rendezvous, on that Sunday morning when the
news of Necker's dismissal spread, carrying with it dismay and fury.
Into Necker's dismissal the people read the triumph of the party hostile to themselves.
It sounded the knell of all hope of redress of their wrongs.
He beheld a slight young man with a pock- marked face, redeemed from utter ugliness
by a pair of magnificent eyes, leap to a table outside the Cafe de Foy, a drawn
sword in his hand, crying, "To arms!"
And then upon the silence of astonishment that cry imposed, this young man poured a
flood of inflammatory eloquence, delivered in a voice marred at moments by a stutter.
He told the people that the Germans on the Champ de Mars would enter Paris that night
to butcher the inhabitants.
"Let us mount a cockade!" he cried, and tore a leaf from a tree to serve his
purpose--the green cockade of hope.
Enthusiasm swept the crowd, a motley crowd made up of men and women of every class,
from vagabond to nobleman, from harlot to lady of fashion.
Trees were despoiled of their leaves, and the green cockade was flaunted from almost
every head. "You are caught between two fires," the
incendiary's stuttering voice raved on.
"Between the Germans on the Champ de Mars and the Swiss in the Bastille.
To arms, then! To arms!"
Excitement boiled up and over.
From a neighbouring waxworks show came the bust of Necker, and presently a bust of
that comedian the Duke of Orleans, who had a party and who was as ready as any other
of the budding opportunists of those days
to take advantage of the moment for his own aggrandizement.
The bust of Necker was draped with crepe. Andre-Louis looked on, and grew afraid.
Marat's pamphlet had impressed him.
It had expressed what himself he had expressed more than half a year ago to the
mob at Rennes. This crowd, he felt must be restrained.
That hot-headed, irresponsible stutterer would have the town in a blaze by night
unless something were done.
The young man, a causeless advocate of the Palais named Camille Desmoulins, later to
become famous, leapt down from his table still waving his sword, still shouting, "To
arms!
Follow me!"
Andre-Louis advanced to occupy the improvised rostrum, which the stutterer had
just vacated, to make an effort at counteracting that inflammatory
performance.
He thrust through the crowd, and came suddenly face to face with a tall man
beautifully dressed, whose handsome countenance was sternly set, whose great
sombre eyes mouldered as if with suppressed anger.
Thus face to face, each looking into the eyes of the other, they stood for a long
moment, the jostling crowd streaming past them, unheeded.
Then Andre-Louis laughed.
"That fellow, too, has a very dangerous gift of eloquence, M. le Marquis," he said.
"In fact there are a number of such in France to-day.
They grow from the soil, which you and yours have irrigated with the blood of the
martyrs of liberty. Soon it may be your blood instead.
The soil is parched, and thirsty for it."
"Gallows-bird!" he was answered. "The police will do your affair for you.
I shall tell the Lieutenant-General that you are to be found in Paris."
"My God, man!" cried Andre-Louis, "will you never get sense?
Will you talk like that of Lieutenant- Generals when Paris itself is likely to
tumble about your ears or take fire under your feet?
Raise your voice, M. le Marquis.
Denounce me here, to these. You will make a hero of me in such an hour
as this. Or shall I denounce you?
I think I will.
I think it is high time you received your wages.
Hi! You others, listen to me!
Let me present you to..."
A rush of men hurtled against him, swept him along with them, do what he would,
separating him from M. de La Tour d'Azyr, so oddly met.
He sought to breast that human torrent; the Marquis, caught in an eddy of it, remained
where he had been, and Andre-Louis' last glimpse of him was of a man smiling with
tight lips, an ugly smile.
Meanwhile the gardens were emptying in the wake of that stuttering firebrand who had
mounted the green cockade.
The human torrent poured out into the Rue de Richelieu, and Andre-Louis perforce must
suffer himself to be borne along by it, at least as far as the Rue du Hasard.
There he sidled out of it, and having no wish to be crushed to death or to take
further part in the madness that was afoot, he slipped down the street, and so got home
to the deserted academy.
For there were no pupils to-day, and even M. des Amis, like Andre-Louis, had gone out
to seek for news of what was happening at Versailles.
This was no normal state of things at the Academy of Bertrand des Amis.
Whatever else in Paris might have been at a standstill lately, the fencing academy had
flourished as never hitherto.
Usually both the master and his assistant were busy from morning until dusk, and
already Andre-Louis was being paid now by the lessons that he gave, the master
allowing him one half of the fee in each
case for himself, an arrangement which the assistant found profitable.
On Sundays the academy made half-holiday; but on this Sunday such had been the state
of suspense and ferment in the city that no one having appeared by eleven o'clock both
des Amis and Andre-Louis had gone out.
Little they thought as they lightly took leave of each other--they were very good
friends by now--that they were never to meet again in this world.
Bloodshed there was that day in Paris.
On the Place Vendome a detachment of dragoons awaited the crowd out of which
Andre-Louis had slipped.
The horsemen swept down upon the mob, dispersed it, smashed the waxen effigy of
M. Necker, and killed one man on the spot-- an unfortunate French Guard who stood his
ground.
That was a beginning. As a consequence Besenval brought up his
Swiss from the Champ de Mars and marshalled them in battle order on the Champs Elysees
with four pieces of artillery.
His dragoons he stationed in the Place Louis XV.
That evening an enormous crowd, streaming along the Champs Elysees and the Tuileries
Gardens, considered with eyes of alarm that warlike preparation.
Some insults were cast upon those foreign mercenaries and some stones were flung.
Besenval, losing his head, or acting under orders, sent for his dragoons and ordered
them to disperse the crowd, But that crowd was too dense to be dispersed in this
fashion; so dense that it was impossible
for the horsemen to move without crushing some one.
There were several crushed, and as a consequence when the dragoons, led by the
Prince de Lambesc, advanced into the Tuileries Gardens, the outraged crowd met
them with a fusillade of stones and bottles.
Lambesc gave the order to fire. There was a stampede.
Pouring forth from the Tuileries through the city went those indignant people with
their story of German cavalry trampling upon women and children, and uttering now
in grimmest earnest the call to arms,
raised at noon by Desmoulins in the Palais Royal.
The victims were taken up and borne thence, and amongst them was Bertrand des Amis,
himself--like all who lived by the sword-- an ardent upholder of the noblesse,
trampled to death under hooves of foreign
horsemen launched by the noblesse and led by a nobleman.
To Andre-Louis, waiting that evening on the second floor of No. 13 Rue du Hasard for
the return of his friend and master, four men of the people brought that broken body
of one of the earliest victims of the
Revolution that was now launched in earnest.