NED’S chance meeting with the painter, whose art was then much exciting, in a characteristic freak of perversity, the enthusiasm of his fellow-citizens, was the prelude to a strange little camaraderie between the two that, so long as it held, was full of positive and negative instruction to the younger man. It came about in this way, that, absorbed in the discussion of a topic of common interest, the gentlemen left the Thuilleries gardens together, M. David accompanying Ned eventually to the Rue Beautreillis. At the door of the fruiterer’s shop the famous artist held out his hand bluntly.
“You have the right religion,” he said: “in an artificial world the cleanest art shall prevail. We can have no standard of truth but what we set ourselves. Strip the model, then, of all meretricious adornments. Monsieur, I shall take the liberty to call upon you.”
He came, indeed—not once but often, walking over from his studio in the Louvre; dropping in at unexpected times; criticising the methods, the actual performance of the Englishman, and even condescending now and again to add to a sketch or canvas a few touches—technical mastery without imagination—that resolved in a moment a difficulty long contended with. Through all he would never cease to expound his views on right art and government—to him inseparable words in the condition of national sanity, and both drawn in their purity from the fountain-head of the S.P.Q.R. at its strictest period. Most often he would discourse, gazing, his hands behind his back, from the window, and sometimes quite aptly illustrating his homilies with types drawn from the human mosaic of the St Antoine below him.
M. David was at this time some forty years of age, an Academician, the acknowledged and popular leader of classic revivalism. He was fashionable, moreover, and had just completed (“mettant la main sur sa conscience”) a royal commission for a “Brutus”! Courted, prosperous, and respected, some moral myosis must still distort to his inner vision all the admiration he evoked. He would make his profit of patronage, secretly raging over the opulent condescension that his cupidity would not let him be without. He would see double entendre in the applause of the social élite, yet hunger for it, cursing himself that the vital flame of his self-confidence must be dependent on such fuel for its warmth. For in truth he was the tumid bug of vanity, bursting with the very scarlet adulation that his instinct told him was inimical to the artistic life and other than its natural food.
Contributing to, or proceeding from, this insane desire of self-aggrandisement, his professional and political convictions (he could not disassociate the two) ran in a restricted channel. But who shall distinguish, in any complaint that is accompanied by an unnatural condition of the nerves, between cause and effect? So M. David’s resentment of patronage may have inclined him to a creed of classic socialism; or his classic proclivities may have prejudiced him against the presumptions of self-qualified rank. In any case, he had twisted his theories, artistic and political, into one thin cord to discipline (or hang) mankind withal, and was as narrow a fanatic as was ever prepared to crucify the disputant that ventured to question his infallibility.
Now, at the outset, Ned fell into some fascination of regard for this casual acquaintance of his. His credo, social and technical, would appear to jump—its first paces, at least—with M. David’s. Moreover, the glamour that naturally informed the presentment of a notable personality condescending to the regard of a tyro who could boast no actual claim to its notice, induced him, no doubt—under this influence of a flattery indirectly conveyed—to an attitude of respectful consideration towards certain foibles in the stranger that, on the face of them, seemed irreconcilable with the highest principles of morality.
It was not so long, however, before his mind began to misgive him that his “half-God” was clay-footed—that here, indeed, was but another inevitable example of that subjective inconsistency that seems so integral a condition of the Gallic temperament. Then: “It is a fact,” he thought, “that one can never start to conjugate a Frenchman but one finds him an irregular verb. Where universal exceptions are to prove the rule, what rule is possible? Anarchy, and nothing else, is the logical outcome of it all.”
For M. David would cry to him, “In a Republic of Truth every unit must be content to contribute itself unaffectedly to the full design.” Yet (as Ned came to know) was no man more greedy than this Academician for vulgar notoriety—none more sensitive to criticism or more resentful of a personal slight. So he (M. David) would preach, not plausibly but whole-mindedly, a religion of purity and cleanliness—a religion of beauty, material and intellectual, whose very ritual should be Gregorian in its sweet austerity. Such were his professions; and nevertheless in the height of his revolutionary popularity he did not scruple to introduce into his pictures details that pandered to the most sordid lusts for the grotesque and the horrible—to generally, indeed, stultify his own declarations of belief by acts that no ethics but those of brutality could justify. Finally, it was in the disgust engendered of a flagrant illustration of such inconsistency that the young Englishman, after some months of gradual disenchantment, “cut” the king’s painter; fled, for solace of a haunting experience, eastwards again, and, snuffing with some new emotion of relish the frankincense of green woods, hugged himself over a thought of his seasonable escape from that national sphinx of caprice, to symbolise whom in a word one must draw upon modern times for the “cussedness” of Wall Street.
Yet even then, had he but foreseen it, he was backing, while dodging Scylla, into the very deadly attraction of Charybdis.
In the meanwhile autumn stole footsore, like a loveless wife, in the track of summer. She was swart and powdered, not à la mode de Versailles; drouthy too, yet with a cry to shrill piercingly in every street of every town of France.
The dust of her going rose and penetrated through chinks and doorways. It overlay the pavements so thickly that one might have thought it the accumulation of that that age-long ministers had thrown in the eyes of the people, the very precipitate of tyranny. It clung, hot and acrid, to the walls of all living palaces, of all princely monuments to the dead, as if it were the expression of that proletariat censorship that would obliterate the very records of a hateful past. It was the condensed breath of destruction settling in a stringent dew, and it might have been exhaled from the ten thousand brassy throats that made clamour in the highways ten thousandfold great because they were the resonant throats of starved and empty vessels.
For the elections were on; and what if bread were dearer than money if his chosen representative was in every man’s mouth? So, through broil and famine the city of Paris echoed to its blazing roofs with jangle jubilant and acclamatory, inasmuch as the no-property qualification gave every honest man a chance of being governed by a rogue. And what prospect in a nation of contrarieties could be more humorously enticing?
Then upon this drouth and this uproar Ned saw the steel glaive of winter smite with a clang that brought ironic echoes from the hollow granaries. It fell swift and sudden; and the clamour, under the lashing of the blade, took a new tone of terror, the wail of despairing souls defrauded of their right atmosphere of hope. For who could look beyond the present with the thermometer below zero; with the prospect blotted out by freezing mists; with the thin shadows of pining women and children always coming between one and the light; with one’s own brain clouded with the fumes of dearth? Yet the elections went on; but now in a sterner spirit of desperation—of insistent watchfulness, too, that no hard-wrung concession should be juggled to misuses under cover of mistifying skies.
Of much misery that neighboured on the wretchedest quarters of a wretched city Ned was, from his position, cognisant. The sight shook his stoicism, and greatly contributed to the disruption (St Denys and M. David negatively helping) of a certain baseless little house of toy bricks that his boyish vanity had conceived to be an endurable system builded by himself. “I have been a philosophe, not a wise man,” he thought. “Life is not a chess-board, its each next step plain to the clean thinker.”
Now it was the sight of the children that secretly wrung his heart: these poor sad babies, disciplined on a primary code of naughtiness and retribution, merit and reward, marvelling from sunken eyes that they should be so punished for no conscious misbehaviour; patiently, nevertheless, retaining their faith in God and man, and making a play-ball of the bitter earth that stung their hands and shrivelled under their feet.
Well, they died, perhaps by hundreds, when the snow was in the streets. “And let them go,” said M. David. “There shall be others to follow by-and-by. As to these, warped and demoralised, they would not prosper the regeneration of the earth. We want a clean race and no encumbrances.”
That was his philosophy—admirably Roman, as he intended it to be. It did not suit Ned.
“There is more to be learnt from a cripple than an athlete,” said that person boldly. “I would sooner, for my own sake, study in this school of St Antoine than in yours of the Louvre, M. David.”
“Truly, every artist to his taste,” said the Academician, with an unsightly grin; and it was Ned’s taste to give of his substance royally and pityingly when a voice cried in his ear of cold and famine.
“Ah, le genereux Anglais!” wept Madame Gamelle. “He has kept the wolf from my door. Would that all mothers could secure to their dear rogues such a fairy godfather as he has been to my cherished one!”
“Without doubt,” said M. David, “he has preserved to you for your virtues the blessing of an encumbrance that by-and-by shall devour you.”
Madame must laugh and protest against this inhuman sarcasm. For the great painter, despite his austerity, had a masterfully admiring way with women that derived from the serpent in Eden.
“Here, then, to prove it no sarcasm, is my contribution to the cause,” he says, and places a sou in the pledge’s fat hand.
But Ned went his way uninfluenced of sardonic counsels.
“When this horror relaxes,” he thought, “in the spring I will go back to Méricourt. I shall be able then, perhaps, to paint a Madonna with a human soul.”
The spring came; the ice melted on the Seine; but it did not melt in the breasts of an electorate hardened by suffering, consolidated in the very “winter of its discontent.” But now at least Ned could sometimes watch from his window without dread of having his soul harrowed by the desolation and misery of its prospect—could watch the fire of the sun burning up a little and a little more each day with the rekindled fuel of hope.
Now it happened that, thus observing, he was many times aware of M. David mingling with the throng below; going with it or against it; strolling, his hands behind his back, with the air of an architect who cons the effect of his own shaping work. This may have been a fancy; yet it was one that dwelt insistently with the onlooker, that haunted and disturbed him with presentiment of evil as month succeeded month and the vision fitfully repeated itself. What attraction so spasmodically drew the man to this quarter of the town? Not Mr Murk himself, for now the little regard of each for each was severed by some trifling outspokenness on the part of the Englishman, and the painter had long ceased of his visits to the fruiterer’s shop in the Rue Beautreillis. Ned, for some unexplainable reason, was troubled.
Once he was aware of M. David, moved from his accustomed deliberation, walking very rapidly in the wake of a man who sped, unconscious of the chase, before him. Ned identified the stranger as he turned off down a by-street. It was Reveillon, the prosperous paper merchant he had happened on on the day of the balloon ascent.
“M. l’Académicien follows the man like his shadow,” he thought, pondering.
This was in April, when the shadows, indeed, were beginning to strengthen in darkness.
Then one morning he started awake to the sound of huge uproar in the streets.
The curtain of the Bastille had not risen; but it had been pulled aside a little, as it were, to make passage to the forestage of the Revolution for certain supers who were to represent the opening chorus. These came swarming through in extraordinary numbers, an earnest of what should be revealed in the complete withdrawal of the screen. They seemed violently inspired, but most imperfectly drilled; and the weapons they handled were not stage properties by any means. And their object was just this—to pull about his ears the factory of a certain M. Reveillon, who had been heard to say that a journeyman could live very comfortably on fifteen sous a-day.
The execrated building was not so far from the Rue Beautreillis but that the hubbub in the air shook the very glass of Ned’s windows. He dressed hastily and ran out into the street. Turning into the Rue St Antoine, that was half choked with a chattering, hooting mob hurrying westwards, he stumbled over the heels of a man who immediately preceded him. With an apology on his lips, he hesitated and cried aloud, “St Denys!”
Even when the stranger disclaimed the title, with a wonder in his eyes unmistakably genuine, Ned could hardly bring himself to realisation of his mistake. True, his acquaintance with the Belgian had been brief enough to admit of subsequent events clouding its details in his memory; yet that, he could have thought, was vivid to recall characteristics of feature and complexion quite impressive in their way. Here were the bright, bold colouring, the girlish contour of face, the brown eyes, and the rough crisp gold of unpowdered hair. Here were the shapely stature, the little fopperies of dress even, the actual confidence of expression. Only, as to the latter, perhaps, a certain soul of sobriety, an earnestness of purpose, revealed themselves in the present instance—a distinction to justify a world of difference.
“A thousand apologies!” said Ned. “I can hardly convince myself even now.”
“I will presume you flatter me, monsieur,” said the other, with a blithe smile. “My name is Suleau, at your service. Pardon me, I must hurry on.”
Ned detained him a moment.
“Let me entreat you, monsieur—this heat, this uproar: what is it all about?”
“What, indeed, monsieur? France, I think, rolls on its back with its feet in the air. A manufacturer of paper says that his hands can live very well, if they choose, on fifteen sous a-day. Hé—he ought to know. But they wish to gut his premises, nevertheless, these new, evil-smelling apostles of liberty. Pardon! will you come with me? I cannot wait. I am a reporter, a journalist, a scribbler against time and my own interests!”
“You are not of the popular party?”
“Ah, monsieur, mon Dieu, monsieur! but I have a sense of humour remaining to me. For all that is serious I am a Feuillant.”
He spoke the last to deaf ears. Ned had fallen behind, blackly pondering.
“This David,” he muttered, “that heard Reveillon say the words, and that has haunted the St Antoine of late—this David.” And with the thought there was the man himself coming slowly on with the crowd past him. The Englishman planted his shoulder against the torrent and managed to sidle alongside the painter. He—M. Jacques-Louis David—carried a very enigmatical smile on his face, the physical malformation of which, however, served him for conscious misinterpreter of many moods. Now it expressed no disturbance over his contact with a person who had offended him.
“Good day,” said he.
“M. David,” said Ned, “I do not forget what enraged you with M. Reveillon in the Thuilleries gardens. I think you are a scoundrel, M. David!”
The other did not even start; much less did he condescend to refute the sudden charge; but he cocked his head evilly as he walked.
“Have you considered,” he said, “that if what you imply be true (which I do not admit), you are insulting a general in the presence of his bodyguard?”
“If what I imply be true,” retorted Ned hotly, “I can understand your indulging any brutal and contemptible vindictiveness.”
Perhaps, in his strenuous indignation, he might have struck at the vicious creature beside him; but the crowd, at that moment violently surging forward, swept him anywhere from his place and saved him the consequences of a foolish impulse.
Now he would fain have turned and escaped from the press, lest by any self-misconception his conscience should accuse him of lending his countenance to an iniquity; for he saw that such was planned and determined on, and for the first time there awoke in his heart some shadowy realisation of the true import of certain months-long signs and significances. He would have turned: he could not. He was wedged in, carried forward, rushed to the very outer core of the congested block of frowsy humanity that stormed and spat and shrieked under the high dull walls of the factory.
Here, perhaps, his national self-sufficiency was his somewhat arrogant counsellor.
“What has this man done,” he cried to those about him, “but exemplify that right to liberty of speech which you all demand?”
A dozen loathing glances were turned upon him. Savage oaths and ejaculations contested the opportuneness of so reasonable a sentiment. But it was not St Antoine’s way, now or at any time, to approve counsel for the defence. Only a cry, a sinister one then first beginning to be heard in the streets, broke out here and there.
“Down with the aristocrat!”
There was threat of a concentric movement upon the Englishman. He felt it as a moral pressure even before his immediate neighbours began to close inwards. One of the latter had a similar consciousness apparently. She was a coarse, fat poissarde, and the shallow groove that was her waist seemed moulded of the very habit of her truculent arms folded in front of her.
“Eh, my little radishes!” she cried in a voice like a corncrake’s. “Advance, you! Come, then—come! Here is a cat shall strip you of your breeches if you venture within her reach.”
Ned felt, and the crowd looked, astonishment over this unexpected championship. In the momentary proximate silence that befell, the shattering explosion of many of M. Reveillon’s windows bursting under volleys of stones was a significantly acute accent.
The fishwife nodded her head a great number of times.
“Hé! my little rats, you will not come? That is well for your whiskers, indeed. And do we not demand liberty of speech, as monsieur says; and are we not taking it to denounce one that would deprive us of the liberty to live? How! You would raise the devil against monsieur?” (she waxed furious in an instant)—“Monsieur l’Anglais, that all the hard winter has lived like a Jacobin friar, that he might give of his substance to the cold and the starving? Monsieur l’Anglais that lodges at the fruiterer’s, and without whose help Fanchon and her brat had been rotting now in St Pélagie! Oh, san’ Dieu! I know—I know! Pigs, beasts, ingrates! It will be well, in truth, for the first that comes within my reach!”
A rolling laugh, that swelled to a roar, took up the very echo of madame’s surprising tirade.
“Vive l’Anglais! the friend of the poor, the apostle of liberty!” shrieked twenty voices.
Too amazed by this sudden rightabout of a national weathercock to protest against its misrepresentation of the direction of his own little breeze of righteousness, Ned made no resistance, when all in a moment he felt himself tossed up on billowing shoulders, and conveyed helplessly from the thick centre of operations. The clamour of hairy throats, exhaling winey fustian about him, staggered his brain. He had not even that self-possession left him to blush to find his stealthy goodness famous. And when the escort landed him at Madame Gamelle’s door, and with hurried vivats testified to his immediate popularity, he could think of no more appropriate remark to make to them than, “I protest, messieurs, that I have never travelled so high in others’, or so low in my own opinion, before”; which, inasmuch as it was fortunately spoken in English, and accompanied by a profoundly ironical bow, served the occasion as gracefully as much compliment would have done.
Feeling at first something like a venturesome infant that had strayed beyond bounds only to be caught back and kissed, Ned mounted to his room to await events. They came thick and swift enough to half induce him to a re-descent upon the scene of action. That temptation he overcame; but all day long, and far into the evening, he wandered, restless and apprehensive, in the Rue St Antoine, watching its turbulent course at the flood, feeling a sympathetic attraction to the electricity of its moods, conscious of the shock of something enacting, or threatening to enact, about that congregated spot where the tumult was heaviest.
Still with the passing of day came no abatement of the popular fury, but rather an accumulating of menace; and thereupon (M. le Baron Besenval, Commandant of Paris, having arrived at his decision) down swooped upon the scene a little company of thirty bronzed and brazen French Guards, in their royal chevrons and military coxcombs; which company, clearing intestinal congestion by measures laxative, readjusted the order of affairs, and persuaded exhausted patriots to their burrows.
To his bed also went Ned reassured, and slept profoundly and confidently as a rescued castaway. But, waking on the morrow, lo! there was renewal of the uproar shaking his windows, but now as if it would splinter the very glass in its frames.
The cause, when he came to examine, was not far to seek. St Antoine, a very confraternity of weasels, baulked but not baffled, was returned to the attack; and at this last it was evident that the paper-maker’s premises were damned. Indeed, the complaint of democracy had suffered a violent relapse during the night; and now, in the new dawn, it blazed and crackled like a furnace. The streets, the roofs, the windows were massed with writhing shapes; the whole quarter jangled in a thunder of voices; a pelt of indifferent missiles, deadly only in the context, rained without ceasing upon the accursed walls.
Ned paused a moment, swirled like a straw in the current of rushing humanity, to take stock of possibilities.
“If it is so they resent a hasty word,” thought he, “God save Paris in the hour of reprisal!”
He felt a little sick at heart. He would look no more.
“I will spend an idle day in the fields of Passy,” he assured himself, “and forget it all, and return in the evening to find the storm blown over.”
He went out by way of the Place St Paul, walking along the line of quays, and watching, something with the tender feeling of a convalescent, the golden frost of sunlight that gemmed the waters of the Seine. It was a fair, sweet morning, too innocent, it seemed, to take account of human passions; and by-and-by its influence so far wrought upon him as that he was able to commit himself to it with some confidence of enjoyment. All about him, moreover, life seemed pleasurably normal—not significant of fear and apprehension, as his soul had dreaded to find it.
But with the approach of dusk his innate misgivings must once more gather force till they knocked like steam in his arteries; and, so dreading, he lingered over his return until deep dark had closed upon the town. At the barrier he heard enough to confirm his disquiet, though the reports of what had happened were so formless and contradictory as to decide him to refer inquiry to the evidence of his own senses. Therefore, in silence and heart-quaking, he made his way eastwards, and presently turned into the dark intricacy of squares that led up to the Rue Beautreillis.
The street, when he reached it, seemed given over to the desolation of night. The taller houses slept pregnant with austerity as vast Assyrian images; the lamps, rocking drowsily in their slings, blinked, one could have thought, to squeeze the slumber from their eyes. Distant sounds there were, but none proceeding from points nearer in suggestion than the far side of dawn.
By-and-by, however, one—a little gurgling noise like the sob of a gutter—slid into Ned’s consciousness, as, speeding forward, his footsteps rang out a very chime of echoes. Almost in the same moment he was upon it, or upon its place of issue—a ragged huddle of shapes pulled into the shadow of a buttress.
A clawing figure, gaunt and unclean, rose at him—recognised him in the same instant, apparently, and gave out a bestial cry.
“She is going, monsieur! May God wither the hand that beat her down, and may the soul of him that directed it scream in everlasting hell!”
He seized the young man’s sleeve and drew him reluctant forward. The huddle of frowzy things parted, that he might see.
The coarse large poissarde; the ally who had yesterday cherished his cause and sung his praises; the great breathing, truculent woman with the defiant voice! Here was the gross material of so much vigour, collapsed, mangled, and flung aside. The little choking noise was accounted for. There was a crimson rent in the woman’s throat. She died while Ned was looking down upon her.
And this mad thing that spat at the sky? Doubtless he was her husband; and he might have been a royal duke from the freedom of his language.
“What does it mean?” cried Ned hoarsely.
One of the groping shapes snarled up at him—
“It is an instance of monseigneur’s paternal kindness to his people.”
There was nothing to be answered or done. The Englishman emptied his purse to the group and hurried on. His worst apprehensions were realised. This was but a sample of what was to follow—a vision to be repeated again and yet again, in indefinite forms. Rebellion had broken and suppurated away during his absence. There were some four or five hundred dead bodies, shot and stabbed, as earnest of its drastic treatment by the national physicians. There might have been more, but that the mob had finally given before M. Besenval’s Switzers with their grape-shotted cannon. Then it retired, pretty satisfied, however, to have justified democratic frenzy by so practical an illustration of the tyranny of class hatred; satisfied, also, as to the moral of its own retreat. M. Reveillon was become a self-constituted prisoner in the Bastille; his factory was a shapeless and clinkerous medley of rubbish. Ned, turning the corner of the Rue Beautreillis, saw the ruins, dusking and glowing fitfully, at a little distance. “And how,” he thought, with a shuddering emotion, “did he, that was so fascinated by the man Rozier’s fate, regard the burning of his own ark of security?”
The street—so it seemed in the expiring red glimmer and the small, dull radiance of bracketed lamps—was a very dismantled graveyard of broken stones and scattered corpses. Amongst the latter moved detached groups of searchers, languidly official, swinging ghostly lanterns. With a groan of lamentation, Ned turned about and beat frantically on the closed shutters of the fruiterer’s shop.
The door was opened, after a weary interval, by Madame Gamelle. The woman’s eyes were febrile. She dragged her lodger over the threshold and snapped the lock behind him. A couple of rushlights burned dimly on the counter. The pledge, in holiday antic, was stuffing a bloody cartouche-box with onions from a basket.
“They killed him at the street corner,” said madame gloatingly. “He shall never murder again—the accursed Garde Française. They had for knives only the sharp tiles from the roofs; but it was easy to willing arms.”
She was transfigured, this meek vendor of cabbages. Anywhere to scratch St Antoine was to find a devil.
“Madame,” said Ned wearily, “it is all quite right, without doubt; but to-morrow, I must tell you, I am to take my leave of Paris.”