PIERRE-VICTORIN VERGNIAUD, the source of much present enthusiasm, the full fountain-head of the Gironde river of eloquence, was already—though but a few months a citizen of Paris—the director of a popular force having an admirable tendency. In him it seemed possible to hail that political architect of the new era who should have the genius to reconcile warring creeds, and shape of men’s profound but formless aspirations an enduring temple of the ideal commonwealth. Poor, yet never conceding a thought to the shame of poverty; simple-minded to the extent that he could not err in justice; hating corruption and loving truth; a moving orator, a large humanitarian, he might have led a world, undissenting, to the worship of the right Liberty, had not his great gifts, his large ideals, been always subject to eclipse by an extreme constitutional indolence. Utterly ingenuous, utterly impressionable; depending upon the moment for inspiration, and so little warped by self-consciousness as never to know the moment to fail him—it was yet often impossible to spur this Vergniaud to necessary action. Madame Roland, the superior being, to whom he was introduced by enthusiastic friends, had no belief in his capacity as a leader; distrusted, and perhaps despised him. Ned—the poor degenerate to a very human type—learned, on the other hand, to love and admire him. For in this mind—as in the mirror of sweet clear water—he found his own chastened theories shaping themselves, taking such form and gentle significance as he had never hitherto but more than conceived to be theirs. Nor this only, or chiefly. He was able to forget something of his own hard unhappiness, of his bitter sense of grievance, in the familiar contemplation of a nature so serene, so noble, so unsolicitous of its self-aggrandisement. From these closing days of darkness, the little friendship that so queerly came to him to tide him opportunely over a period of wretched indecision remained an abiding pathetic memory.
Citizen Vergniaud lived in a shabby lodging near the Tivoli Gardens. Thither Ned accompanied him on the morning of their meeting, and thither many times he found his way again. The little beggarly room became a haven of rest to his tormented spirit—a confessional-box wherein he could always leave some part of his great weight of oppression. And, now and again, even, moved to waive his personal interest in that fine spirit, and to repay some part of the healing advice so disinterestedly lavished upon himself, he would play the père spirituel in his turn, and whip his penitent with a cobweb lash of rebuke.
“My Peter,” he would complain, “you dwell too long on the overture to your career. It may be rich in all the suggested harmonies, but it is time you set to work on the opera.”
“Time!” would cry Vergniaud, with a smile. (He might be, perhaps, unpacking a very little parcel of cheap linen that had just reached him from his family, his dear simpletons, of Bordeaux.) “But time is no arbitrary measure to the man who hath studied to make his own.”
Says Ned, “You may make it, but you will always give it away to the first specious beggar that asks.”
“Then I am only liberal with that that I do not value. ’Tis a poor habit of charity, I admit. But I could never keep it; hark! little Edward—I could never keep time, even when I danced!”
“So foolish heirs mortgage their reversions.”
“So alchemists squander their inexhaustible treasures, you mean. When time has done with me, I shall be past caring. Maybe the spendthrift will have gilded a poor home or two in his world.”
“And, had he economised, he might have gilded the temples of an epoch.”
“Oh, thou art an elegant moraliser! But I am more modest for myself—a Fabian by sentiment, not policy. I tell thee, an age so rich in opportunities invites to procrastination. A multiplicity of choice is the last inducement to choose. I loiter, like a child, in the fair, with my silver livre-tournois in my pocket, and, until I spend it, I am lord of a hundred prospective delights. Let me wait till the lights are burning low, and then I will make my selection—the crown to a pyramid of enjoyments.”
“And find that others before you have taken the pick of the fair while you ecstatically considered, and that you have at the last paid full price for a discarded residue.”
“What, then, my friend! I shall be richer than the prudent by measure of a whole feast of anticipation—more satisfied, if less gorged. The early bird eats his chicken in the egg. (Corne de Dieu! there is a fine marriage of proverbs!) He has nothing to look forward to but a day of blank satiety. I cannot at once have the dreams of youth and the sober retrospections of age.”
So he would talk ex curia, a dilatory, lovable vagabond, with a rare power of enchantment drawn from some hidden depths, as from a fern-curtained well. Perhaps this sensuous personal charm—whereby he would appear to flatter with signal affectionate regard each in turn of his numerous acquaintances—would of itself have failed after the first to win a poor love-stricken from prolonged contemplation of any but his own interests. It was the man’s spasmodic revelations of unexpected virile forces held in reserve that would suddenly convert in another a little growing sentiment of tolerant disdain to an eager desire to be acclaimed friend by this subject of his condescension. So, may be, the force operated upon Ned. For succeeding his first gratification over an introduction to one in whom he had latterly prefigured the regenerator of France, came a thought of désagrément in his soul’s nominee, a feeling of disillusionment in which he was prepared to recognise another example of Fortune’s wanton baiting of his personal cherished ideals. Then one day he heard this seeming waiter on Providence, this almost coatless landholder of Utopia, speak in the Assembly; and thenceforth he had nothing but reverence for the ardent soul, whose misfortune only it was to be bounded by a love more human in its essence than divine. He had seen the familiar figure sitting with its hand over its face; he had next seen the face revealed from the tribune, inspired, transformed, as if the hand itself, consecrate as a priest’s, had touched and wrought the priestly sacrament of confirmation; and the sermon of high government that followed had taken wings of fire from the burning spirit that informed it; and the hearts of men had kindled and glowed, flaring at length—alas, too self-consumingly!—into roaring flame.
Well, such moments were for Ned’s holiday moods. This present friendship and admiration saved him, perhaps, from hobnobbing with more harmfully potent spirits. Yet the one enthusiasm could galvanise him only fitfully into an interest in the passionate scenes amongst which he moved. So negative a pole is love—when turned from the north-star of its hopes—to all that in less misconverted circumstances would attract it. Here was he a spectator at last of the stupendous drama in the early rehearsals of which he had been so profoundly interested; and he had nothing for it all but a lack-lustre eye, which he must always keep from turning inwards by an effort. He lived, in fact, in a little miserable tub of his own choosing, while the Alexanders of a political renaissance made history around, and unregarded of, him.
Much time he spent moodily gazing from the windows of his lodgings in the Rue St Honoré. Thence looking, his life seemed to become a dream of motley crowds always drifting by. Stolid, tight-buttoned guards, with brigand moustaches like dolls’; frowzy revolutionary conscripts, swaggering to glory; tattered deputations, exhibiting the seals of their memorials in the shape of old blood-stains dried upon arms and faces, and headed, perhaps, by some trimly arrogant sectional president, with his sleek hair and tricolour sash—vociferous or intent, in noisome clouds they floated by; and Ned could seldom rescue so much curiosity from the heart of his self-centred indifference as to inquire what was their destination or significance. A shoddy Paris—a Paris of gaudy fustian. So far a certain general impression seemed bitten into him; and, desultorily moved by it, he would rarely wake to a little rhapsodical song of lamentation over yet another shattered ideal. This city and this people that he had loved, and of which and whom he had expected and prophesied so noble a triumph of self-emancipation! Now the tangled mazes of “party” differences seemed designed only to render the central cause unattainable. Now, he would think, the history of their municipal government was always to be likened to the story of an iceberg—a story of top-heaviness periodically recurring—of base and summit exchanging positions again and again, the depths replacing the head, the head the depths. And did it signify, as in the iceberg, a steady attenuation, a bulk of force and grandeur constantly lessening? God save France, and exorcise the sluggard demon in Pierre-Victorin!
By-and-by, sick at last of inaction, the poor fellow took to the streets, restlessly traversing all quarters of the city—its bye-lanes, its loaded thoroughfares—both by day and lamp-light. Once he made his way to the now ancient ruins of the Bastille, and dully leaving them after a dull inspection—or rather retrospection—looked half curiously up at his old lodgings, yet had not the spirit to visit them and Madame Gamelle. Once a languid thrill penetrated his torpor upon his chancing upon view of an old acquaintance, the Chevalier d’Eon, so queerly associated with a certain episode in his vanished life. He passed the strange creature in the Thuilleries gardens, whither he had come years ago to see a balloon ascend. She stared him full in the face, but without recognition, as she went by. Her eyes bagged in their sockets; she looked old and shabby—an improvident actress retired upon scant savings. Already her gaze had grown unspeculative; the first menace of senility suggested itself in the drooping of her fat old jaw. She had come over from England, Ned learned, a year ago, to petition the National Assembly—in the days before its dissolution—for leave to resume her helmet and her sabre and to serve in the army. Her request had received the double honour of applause and of relegation to the official minutes—where it slept forgotten. The poor chevalier must consign herself gracefully to oblivion—which no actor or actress ever did. She lived on at Paris a few months longer—a decaying old body with a grievance; then returned for the last time to England, where, dying by-and-by in poverty, and being handed over to the final merciless inquisition of the mortuary, she was adjudged—a male impostor, and so committed to a dishonoured grave.
Upon Egalité (but recently so designated) Ned happened from time to time, yet only to understand that this would-be popular constituent was resolved upon “cutting” him, a titled aristocrat, from popular motives. Therefore, despite the gnawing of the fox of anxiety at his ribs, the young Englishman, in his pride, would make no appeal to the man who alone could ease his torment; but he endeavoured to ascertain, through indirect report, what were the chances of an early return to Paris on the part of certain notable emigrants; and in the meantime he must settle himself down, with what remnants of philosophy he could command, to a life of miserable inaction and irresolution.
Then, once upon a day, behold! into his field of vision, the spectrum of a ghost more remotely haunting than any familiar to his recenter experience, flashed Théroigne, “Our Lady of Darkness,” the realised presentment of a destiny long foreshadowed. And henceforth it was as if he had been hurled into one of those red arteries of fatality (of which the just-erected guillotine was as the throbbing heart) that laced the city in all directions.
He was strolling with Vergniaud, again in the Thuilleries gardens. It was a day of lazy sunshine, and the walks and grass-plots were crowded. Paris must laugh and breathe, though in the committee rooms yonder the whirring machinery of election to the new National Convention was shaking the whole town; though forty-seven out of the forty-eight sections, with their tag-rag and bob-tail, were howling for the king’s abdication through all the courts of the city; though the shadow of the Brunswicker and his emigrants was already projecting itself, like a devil’s search-light, from a contracting horizon; though hate, and terror, and fanaticism were crouching in every corner with smouldering linstocks in their hands. The babble was not less, or less animated, for this. Children sailed their boats on the ponds, or played ball about the grass. It was a scene of light and good-humour.
Against the terrace of the Feuillans, to the north of the gardens, the strollers came upon the first sign of a serpent in this Eden—a long, broad, tricolour ribbon stretched from tree to tree, and bearing the inscription, “Tyran, notre colère tient à un ruban; ta couronne tient à un fil.”
“It shall be excused, or blamed, for its wit,” said Vergniaud, and as he spoke there came uproar from a distance, where some victim to mob-resentment was being trailed through a horsepond. A cloud shut out the sun. The two men, fallen suddenly moody, made their way to a gate that led from the gardens into the Rue du Dauphin, that was a tributary of the Rue St Honoré. Vergniaud glanced up at the name of the former. “Tient à un fil,” he murmured, and shook his head, with a sigh.
On the moment of their emerging into the greater thoroughfare, a discordant rabble came upon them—a mouthing, sweltering throng of patriots, with a woman at their head banging a drum.
“Voilà la prêtresse habituée, Théroigne de Méricourt!” said Vergniaud, with a soft chuckle.
Ned gasped and stared. He had not alighted on this woman—had recalled her only fitfully—since the night when she fled from his uncle’s house. Even Madame de Lawoestine’s reference to her had affected him but indifferently. If, during his present sojourn in Paris, he, absorbed in more introspective searchings, had heard casual mention of the “Liége courtesan,” the “coryphée of the Orleanists,” the beloved (according to the wits of Les Actes des Apôtres) of the Deputy Populus (who did not so much as know her), a least desire to identify this reputation with the one of his experience had not overtaken him. Théroigne—were it, indeed, the Théroigne of his knowledge—had only followed the course he might have predicted for her. To drain the rich for the benefit of the needy—that were a noble form of solicitation. To feed starving patriots and their cause with the fruits of her dishonour was a rendering of the theme that scarcely commended itself to other than Parisian morals. Yet he had lost sight, no doubt, of the motive that induced her to wage war, by whatever means, upon the order patrician. It was to be recalled to his memory.
For now, suddenly, he was face to face with the embodiment of a passion to whose early processes he had unwittingly contributed. The girl saw, halted her vociferous troupe, and the next instant came towards him. A fantastic figure, a thing of shreds and gaudy tatters, detached itself from the throng and followed at her heels.
“Corne de Dieu!” muttered Vergniaud, “the dog too?”
Théroigne stopped in front of the Englishman—a presentment, in flesh and clothing, of vivid, barbaric licence. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks glowed. For four years the “Defier of God,” she had walked with her face to the sun. She was, and was to be, “Mater Tenebrarum—the mother of lunacies, the suggestress of suicides”—a flaming evolution from the scorned and abandoned village beauty.
She had on a little military jacket of dark-blue, over a white chemisette cut low to her swelling figure; a tricolour sash, in which was stuck a pistol, went round her waist, and from this fell to her ankles a short skirt of scarlet. Cocked daintily on her head was an elfin hat with feathers à la Henri IV., and suspended from her shoulder by a red ribbon a little smart drum bobbed and tinkled at her side as she walked.
She clinched a hand upon her bosom, scorning and daring, in the fierce exultation of her beauty, this possible critic of it.
“We are well met,” she said. “Dost thou know me, citizen Englishman?”
“I know you, Théroigne.”
“Thou liest, thou! Thou takest me, I can see it, for some past poor victim of thy use and abuse, or, if not of thine, of another’s. I never was in Méricourt—dost thou hear?—unless it is a province of hell! I never appealed to the honour of a class that knows no honour but in name.”
Vergniaud, in some serene astonishment, came forward.
“Citizeness,” he said, “you surely amaze my friend, who is a child of the land of freedom.”
She laughed in one breath.
“Do I amaze him? I thought his looks claimed knowledge of me.”
Then she turned upon Ned once more, her furious disdain giving to the woman in her.
“I heard thou wert in Paris, monsieur le vicomte. Believe me, it is an evil place at this present for such as thou.”
“And from whom did you hear it, Mademoiselle Lambertine of Méricourt?” said Ned, with perfect coolness.
Her eyes flashed, her lips set at him.
“Ah,” she cried, rage overmastering the scorn in her voice, “but it is pitiful, is it not, for one so particular in his reputation to be jilted by the bastard of Orleans!”
Hearing her laugh, the grotesque creature, who stood still at her elbow, began to chuckle and caper.
“But yes,” he babbled in a wryed, indistinct voice, “Pamela—yes, yes—the bastard of Orleans!”
Ned, gone pale as a sheet, took a fierce step forwards, and at that the woman sprang and intercepted him, putting her hand on her vile henchman’s shoulder.
“Thou shalt not touch him!” she cried. Her fingers caught at the pistol-stock in her belt. Menacing oaths came from the ragged group that awaited her return.
“Tell him, Lucien,” she said to the wretched creature, “who it is we are ever seeking through the streets of Paris.”
“My brother Basile,” answered the man.
His face was a fearful sight—melted featureless it seemed, and with tangs of rusty hair dropping stiff from it in the unscarred patches. For the rest he was nothing but a foul-clad cripple—idiotic, distorted.
She turned upon Ned again.
“Dost thou know me now?” she cried; “or am I still to thee the simple fool that could be wronged and insulted with impunity?”
She bent forward and dropped her voice, so that every word came from it distinct.
“Listen to me. All these years I have sought and found him not. Now, at last, word comes to me that he is here in Paris, that he is identical with one that insults, through the faction she represents, the woman he has outraged beyond endurance.”
She paused and drew herself up, then raised her hand in a threatening attitude.
“My star brightens! First one, and again one! Out of the past they are drawn—drawn like night birds into a charcoal-burner’s fire, and they shall fall before me and my foot trample their necks!”
She turned and struck her dog roughly on the shoulder.
“Is thy tooth sharp, Lucien? are thy claws like a devil’s rake to rend and to scorch? Courage, my friend! the moment arrives—for you and for me, Lucien, the moment arrives!”
She had fetched drumsticks from her sash, and now brought them down with a little snapping roll and break.
“Forward!” she cried (and she looked back significantly over her shoulder). “The crown of martyrdom to the devotee that would rather wed than make a bastard!”
Again the sticks alighted with a crash and roll.
“C’est nous qu’on ose méditer de rendre à l’antique esclavage!” she sang out shrilly; and all the throaty mob took up the chorus, “Aux armes, citoyens!”
So, reeling and howling, and drifting backwards a black smoke of menace towards the stranger whose name, for any or no particular reason, seemed to be written in the dark book of its café-chantant Hippolyté, the procession passed on its way. The stragglers, who had been drawn by curiosity to the neighbourhood of the interview, dispersed, and the two men were left alone.
Vergniaud, with a shrug of his shoulders, looked at Ned, who seemed to be muttering to himself.
“A very précieuse-ridicule,” murmured the Frenchman. “I would not have you take the little pretty rogue seriously.”
Ned seized him by the wrist.
“Did you hear her?” he exclaimed in a concentrated agony of voice.
Vergniaud nodded his head.
“About monsieur le duc’s protégée?” he answered uneasily.
“How did she know of her—of me?”
“Mon ami, cannot you tell?” was the compassionate, evasive reply.
“Yes,” cried Ned violently, “I can tell. He lied about the letter. The woman told him in it why she had wished to get rid of me, and he lied about it.”
“Come,” said Vergniaud, “if it is so, the lie acquitted him, at least, of a cruel discourtesy towards you.”
Ned laughed like a devil.
“Acquitted him!” he shrieked; “and while he reserved the jest to retail it to his brazen drab here! Oh, I know that no road is too common for Monsieur le Duc d’Orléans! And my—and this that I have hugged to my soul and cherished as almost too sacred for my own thoughts to prey upon! To be used to the foul purposes of a harlot and her lecher! Oh, my God!—I will kill him!”
Vergniaud essayed a manner of soothing.
“The shrine of love can only be desecrated from within. These may storm at the closed windows of thy soul, and the draught but make the sacred lamp of thy heart burn brighter. Hold up thy head, my dear friend.”
“I have never lowered it,” muttered Ned; but he seemed hardly to hear what the other said.
“’Tis a specious theatrical jade,” went on Vergniaud, “and always alert for situations. Witness her babbling reunions in the Rue de Rohan, where enough gas is brewed in a night to float ten balloons. Witness her habit of attire, her drum, her dog—the misbegotten maniac that she rescued months ago from the Salpétrière, and hath devoted to some mission of devilry that is the crowning infirmity of his brain. Bah! It is all affectation, I believe. She will certainly pose by-and-by before the judgment-seat.”