IN the early morning of the 10th of August a young man, wearing the uniform of the National Guards, was arrested in the Champs Elysées by a patrol of the very corps to which he presumably belonged. This young man—of a bright, confident complexion, crisp gold hair, and a rather girlish turn of feature—took his mishap with an admirable sang-froid.
“Very well, my friends,” he said. “And I am arrested on suspicion—of what?”
“Of being an accursed Royalist in disguise,” answered the corporal gruffly.
The stranger nodded to the soldier.
“When the good cause triumphs,” said he, “it shall be remembered to your credit that you could recognise a gentleman through the trappings of a brigand.”
“Ah-hé s’il ne tient qu’à ça!” replied the corporal briefly, with a sniff. “Before this sun sets there will be, perhaps, some hundreds of you gentry the fewer.”
“My faith!” said the other, “and what a shortsighted policy: to post a cloud of educated witnesses to the skies, to testify in advance to your moral inefficiency!”
They took him to the Cour des Feuillans—a yard neighbouring on that very spot where Ned, a day or two earlier, had had his contretemps with Théroigne and her satellites. Here, thrust into an outbuilding that had been temporarily converted into a guard-room, he alighted upon many acquaintances in a like predicament.
“Does it all read failure?” he whispered to a colossal creature beside him. This—also, presumably, a grenadier of the nation—was, in fact, the Abbé Bougon, an ecclesiastic of the Court, who wrote plays, yet had never conceived a situation one-half so dramatic as this in which he now found himself.
“Hush!” murmured the giant. “Yes; the worst is to be feared.”
By-and-by the prisoners were summoned, in order, to examination in an adjoining room. Long, however, before it came to the cool young stranger’s turn, a sound of growing uproar without the building had swelled to a thunder harsh and violent enough to ominously interfere, one might have thought, with the procès-verbal within. The deep diapason of massed voices, the crisp clash of pikes, the flying of furious ejaculations—startling accents to the whole context of menace—assured him that here was evidence of such a counterbuff to palace intrigue as palace fatuity had never conceived might threaten it.
Suddenly, in the midst of the tumult, he thought he heard his own name cried.
“Suleau!” And again, “Scélérat! Imposteur!”
He got upon a bench by a window that commanded a view of the court. This, he saw,—a wide, enclosed space,—was full of blue-coated soldiers. A posse of them made a present show of keeping the gates of the yard; but the gates themselves, significant to the true character of their defence, they had neglected to close. Beyond, in the road, and extending at least so far over the Thuilleries gardens as his view could compass, a packed congregation of patriots—quite typical savages—rested for a moment on its weapons. It listened, it appeared, to a commissary of the section, who, mounted on a tub by the gates, counselled methods judicial. A little space had been left about the orator, and now into this in an instant broke a woman—a wild vivandière, she seemed, of the new religious service of blood and wine—of the transubstantiation of Liberty. Without a moment’s hesitation she caught the commissary by a leg, and, hurling him to the ground, usurped his place. An exultant roar of applause shook the air. The poor deposed tribune, rubbing his bones, rose, and bolted for shelter. Suleau chuckled.
Now he did not know Théroigne; but he had laughed consumedly at her and her pseudo-classical pretensions in more than one Royalist print. He laughed at many things, did this Suleau—not sparing the gloom-distilling Jacobins, nor, in particular, Citizen Philip Egalité and his faction, of whom was Citizeness Lambertine; and he was so breezily headstrong, so romantically sworn to a picturesque cause, that he would not calculate the cost of pitting his wit against the vanity of a coryphée whose nod, in this height of her popularity, often confirmed a wavering sentence, whose smile rarely franked an acquittal. Besides, women—even the most foolish of them—like to be taken seriously.
This woman, it would seem, spoke vigorously, and entirely to the humour of her auditors. Only there appeared to prevail something rankly personal against himself, of all the twenty-two arrested, in her diatribe. He caught the sound of his own name uttered again and again to an accompaniment of oaths and execrations. This, at least, flattered him with the assurance that he had done something to earn the transcendent animosity of the many-headed.
“I present myself with an order of merit,” he murmured, gratified; and immediately he was summoned to his examination.
He was conducted between guards to the room of inquisition. In it he recognised many of his pre-indicted comrades in misfortune—twenty-one in all—huddled into a corner by a window. The room was otherwise crammed with soldiers, commissaries, and a few of the breechless. A thin man, in a state of palpable nervous excitement, sat behind a table. This was the Sieur Bonjour, first clerk of the Marines and President of the Section of the Feuillans. He opened upon the prisoner at once.
“It is useless to deny that you are Suleau, the Royalist pamphleteer.”
“Indeed,” replied the captive, with equal promptitude, “I would not so stultify monsieur’s fine perspicacity in discovering what I have never concealed.”
“Yet you disguise yourself in the garb of liberty.”
“No more than monsieur, surely.”
The president struck his hand on the table.
“It is not for me to bandy words with you. You were arrested when patrolling the Champs Elysées, at an hour when all respectable men are in bed.”
“If,” said Suleau, “at an hour when all respectable men are in bed, where was monsieur?”
“Enough!” cried Bonjour angrily. “You are accused of conspiring with these to resist the will of the people—by innuendo, by direct insult to the people’s representatives—finally, by banding yourself with others to inquire secretly into, that you might successfully out-manœuvre, the processes of the movement having forfeiture for its object.”
“I congratulate monsieur,” said Suleau irrelevantly, “upon his admirable manœuvring for election to the Ministership of Marines.”
The president scrambled to his feet with an oath. The room broke into ferment.
“I beg to inform monsieur,” cried the prisoner, raising his voice, “that I am in possession of a municipal pass to the chateau of the Thuilleries!”
“Yes, yes—and we!” cried the huddle of captives by the window.
With the very echo of their words there came tumult in the vestibule, a trample of feet, and the head of a frowzy deputation burst into the room. The young Royalist turned about and, folding his arms, quietly faced the inrush. A woman was to its front—she he had seen mount the rough tribune in the yard to denounce him. He saw her now marking him down with a triumphant fury in her eyes—a strange, beautiful creature—his own enigmatical Nemesis, it seemed.
“Citizen president,” she cried in a full bold voice, “while St Antoine awaits your decision St Antoine is paralysed. Its cannon yawn in the faubourg; its pikes stab only at the air. To clear the ground of these outposts—bah! here needs not the interminable civil processes. Mouchards all, arrested armed in a state of belligerency, they shall be subject to martial law. In the name of the national fraternity, that to-day shall be confirmed and cemented, I demand that these prisoners be handed over to the people.”
A murmur succeeded her outcry. The president, white to the ears, stilled it with uplifted hand. He looked a moment at the young Royalist, a bitter stiff smile on his lips.
“It is just!” he cried in a sudden thin voice. “This is no time to dally, as the demoiselle Théroigne informs us. Conduct all the prisoners into the yard.”
The order had not passed his lips when there came a splintering crash, and in an instant the whole room was in roaring racket and confusion. Some half of the prisoners, forereading their certain doom, had made a desperate plunge for escape through the rearward window by which they stood. They got clear away. Their less prompt, or fortunate, companions were in the same moment surrounded and isolated each from each.
Suleau lifted his voice above the din.
“Commit me, my friends, to the sacrifice. Perhaps my blood, which, it seems, they most desire, will appease their fury!”
He struggled to throw himself towards the door. His motive misunderstood, a half-dozen sans-culottes flung themselves upon and pinioned him in their arms. At the same instant Théroigne leapt like a cat and seized him by his collar.
“At last!” she hissed in his ear. “Dost thou know me?”
“Thou art Théroigne!” he panted. He had caught the president’s words. He understood now something of the reason of this woman’s violence.
“Ah!” she cried in a hurried fury of speech, “and has not my time come, thou dog with a false name, thou nameless cur, so to slander and revile the woman thou drovest to ruin?”
They were slowly edging him towards the door. He could only shake his head at her.
“Why dost thou not speak?” she urged. “Why dost thou not implore my mercy? I could save thee if I would.”
He still did not answer.
“Ah!” she sighed, with a cruel feint of tenderness, “for the sake of the old days, Basile! Ask me, by the memory of our embraces, of thy child that I bore in my womb, to pity and protect thee!”
“You are mad,” he cried. “I have never seen you in my life.”
She struck him across the mouth. The blow, the sight of the little blood that sprang from the wound, were a double provocation to the beasts of prey. They bore him with a rush to the outer door, through it, into the yard beyond. Torn, bleeding, fighting every foot of his way, but never protesting, he would sell his life dearly to these mongrels. The yelling crowd surged and rocked before him. Suddenly—with that exaltation of the perceptions that often seems to signify the first flight-essay of the soul—he saw far back in the thick of the press of inhuman faces one face that he recognised as that of a man who, years before, on the morning of the Reveillon riots, had spoken to him, mistaking him for another. Now, from the expression of this one face, he educed a desperate hope. He gathered it from the anguish of its features, from the conviction that its owner was frantically endeavouring to thrust and beat a passage towards him through the throng. God! he thought; if he could only reach the face, he would somehow be saved.
With a furious effort he tore himself free, and snatched at and wrenched a sabre from a hand that threatened him.
“Here!” he shrieked to the face; “to meet me, monsieur—to meet me!”
He had actually cut his way a half-dozen yards before a hand—the woman’s—seized him from the back and dragged him to the ground. With a groan he fell, trampled into a forest of tattered legs.
“Cry to me for mercy!” screamed the harlot.
“No,” he answered faintly.
She yelled then, beating a space about her with her hands. “Lucien, it is the moment that has come!”
Snarling and dribbling, a hideous thing broke through the press and flung itself upon the fallen man.
* * * * * * * *
Torn and breathless, Ned shouldered his way at last into the little bloody arena. A woman—her foot upon the neck of something, some bespattered creature that whimpered and prayed to her—looked stupidly down upon the dead and mangled body of the man she had destroyed.
“Accursed! oh, thou accursed!” panted the new-comer in terrible emotion. “It is not he, St Denys, that thou hast murdered.”