FROM the day of the massacre in the Cour des Feuillans, when—a casual and involuntary witness of the opening deed of blood—he had made a desperate attempt to save the life of the man who, as he supposed, was being sacrificed to a misconception, Ned had no thought but that he was fallen, a second time and inextricably, under the deadly spell of the city that was at once his horror and his attraction. That he had not paid the penalty with his own life of so quixotic an interposition rather confirmed him in the sense of fatality that had overtaken him. He could afterwards only recall vaguely the expression of terror with which Théroigne had accepted his furious impeachment of her barbarity; the resentful rage of the mob over his denunciation of its idol; his imminent peril, and the immunity from personal harm suddenly and unexpectedly secured him at the hands of the very loathed object of his execration. He had given her no thanks for her advocacy. It had condemned him merely to prolonged struggle with an existence that had grown hateful to him. Defrauded of his love, disenchanted with life, his residue of the latter was not, he felt, worth the devil’s purchase.
And yet this sentiment carried with it a certain wild passion of personal irresponsibility that was not without its charm. Into the being of the people that had waived for the present, it seemed, all thought of consistent conduct, he was absorbed without effort of his own—absorbed so helplessly, that even the wounding stab of a certain question, once engrossingly poignant to himself, dulled of its pain and could be borne. It was as difficult to think collectedly, indeed, in the Paris of those days as it is while rushing through a strong wind.
Now, in the thick of the events that followed fast and irresistible upon the heels of an overture to what was, in truth, a disguised anarchy, he could not but feel himself something renewing that state of mind, curious and fiercely pitiful, that had been induced in him years before by his contemplation of the first scenes of a tragedy that was now labouring in its penultimate act. And here the emotion of the moment seemed always significant of the trend of the plot, until—puff! the dramatic weathercock would go round, and the wind of applause blow from another quarter, freezing or wet according to a rule that was just the regular absence of any. But the food of excited conjecture never failed to save his heart from feeding upon its own tissues, and was the sustenance to his starving hopes. Indeed, at this last, it seldom occurred to him, a temporary sojourner in the city of doom, that he was other than an unalienable minute condition of the city’s life; and he would no more than his friend Pierre-Victorin desire to repudiate his liabilities thereto.
The 10th of August had passed like a death-cloud—“a ragged bastion fringed with fire”—sweeping the streets with a storm of blood. The king, dethroned, was a prisoner in the Temple; the mob occupied itself in the violent erasing of all symbols of royalty. Vergniaud and the Gironde were in perilous, protesting power; the prisons were glutting; the guillotine had begun to rise and fall like a force-pump, draining the human marshes. Of Théroigne, the militant priestess of St Antoine, Ned heard only, vaguely rumoured, that—sated, perhaps, with her share in the events of the Thuilleries massacre—she was inclining to the moderate policy of Brissot and his following, and was temporarily, at least, withdrawn from the influence of her earlier colleagues. That she was moved to this course by any self-loathing for the deed of which he had been witness he, detesting her, would not believe. But he had no wish to entertain one further thought of her in his mind.
So the month sped by—its every succeeding hour fresh fuel to the popular wrath and terror over the rumoured advance of the Allies upon the city,—and on the last day of it a strange little rencontre took place between two of the minor actors in a very extraneous branch of the general tragedy.
Ned, aimlessly strolling through the Faubourg of St Marcel in the south-east quarter of the city, had turned, on the evening of this day, into the boulevard that ran straight northward, by the ancient city wall, from the Place Mouffetard to the Seine. His way took him past the horse-market, and—inevitably, therefore, to the context—past an adjacent house of correction for blacklegs. This ironically named hospital—an iron-cased lazaretto, in truth, the prison of the Salpétrière—was situate upon a dismal wedge of waste land between the new and old enceintes of the city. It was a brutal, gloomy pile, its walls exuding, one might have thought, the ichor of a thousand diseases, moral and physical. Sooty, unlovely as a factory—as indeed it was, of the devil’s wares—its noisome towers, blotted on the sky, decharmed the soft reflected burning of the sunset, and made a vulgarity of their whole leafy neighbourhood. From its grated windows, high up in the foul air of its own exhaling, behind which the gallows-tree birds built their nests, caws and screams issuing were evidences of a very swarming rookery. Here and there, the white, hair-draggled face of a strumpet stared from behind bars; here and there an inward light—like a wandering fen candle—could be seen travelling from story to story.
Ned, as he approached the building, quickened in his walk; for he was aware of a batch of fresh prisoners, under escort, being driven across the boulevard towards the central gate; and with the instinct to spare misfortune the impertinence of unofficial inquest, he would hurry to put himself beyond suspicion of prying. In this good motive, however, he was baulked; for a subsequent party—a solitary culprit walking between guards—issued from the same direction, and cut across and encountered him just as he approached the entrance.
He started, and strangled an immediate inclination to exclaim aloud. For in the lonely malefactor, going by him with bent head and lowering, preoccupied face, he recognised—he was sure of it—Basile de St Denys.
Degraded, vitiated—a shameful, ravaged personality, as unlike, in his existing condition, the bright soul who had served, unconsciously to them both, for his scapegoat—here was, without question, the unlicensed once-lord of Méricourt. And the woman, his victim, had erred only, it seemed, as to the direction of his presence in the city—had erred, perhaps, because she could not realise that, consistent to his nature, he must be sought, after all these years, along the lower levels of existence.
The felons and their escort disappeared; Ned, dwelling where he had paused, came to himself presently with a shock, as if out of a dream. On an immediate impulse he turned into the prison yard, and mounted a shallow flight of steps leading up to a great studded door that was pierced by an open wicket. Looking through this, he saw the figure he sought receding down a dim, long vestibule; and at the moment he was faced by a turnkey.
“What do you here?” exclaimed the man harshly. “That Jules is a fine porter!”
“I thought I saw one I knew pass in.”
“It is like enough. They have many of them a large acquaintance”—and he offered to slam the wicket in the intruder’s face. Ned jingled, and produced his “tip.”
“That is another question,” said the man.
“Now,” said Ned, “is the name of that last prisoner that entered Basile de St Denys?”
“I know nothing of the de. What sort of citizen art thou? But, otherwise—yes.”
“And what is he accused of?”
“A common enough matter: forging assignats.”