SCARAMOUCHE
Book III - The Sword
CHAPTER III
President Le Chapelier
The ferment of Paris which, during the two following days, resembled an armed
camp rather than a city, delayed the burial of Bertrand des Amis until the
Wednesday of that eventful week. Amid events that were shaking a nation to its
foundations the death of a fencing-master passed almost unnoticed even among his
pupils, most of whom did not come to the academy during the two days that his
body lay there. Some few, however, did come, and these conveyed the news to
others, with the result that the master was followed to Pere Lachaise by a score
of young men at the head of whom as chief mourner walked Andre-Louis.
There were no relatives to be advised so far as Andre-Louis was aware,
although within a week of M. des Amis' death a sister turned up from Passy to
claim his heritage. This was considerable, for the master had prospered and
saved money, most of which was invested in the Compagnie des Eaux and the
National Debt. Andre-Louis consigned her to the lawyers, and saw her no more.
The death of des Amis left him with so profound a sense of loneliness and
desolation that he had no thought or care for the sudden access of fortune which
it automatically procured him. To the master's sister might fall such wealth as
he had amassed, but Andre-Louis succeeded to the mine itself from which that
wealth had been extracted, the fencing-school in which by now he was himself so
well established as an instructor that its numerous pupils looked to him to
carry it forward successfully as its chief. And never was there a season in
which fencing-academies knew such prosperity as in these troubled days, when
every man was sharpening his sword and schooling himself in the uses of it.
It was not until a couple of weeks later that Andre-Louis realized what had
really happened to him, and he found himself at the same time an exhausted man,
for during that fortnight he had been doing the work of two. If he had not hit
upon the happy expedient of pairing-off his more advanced pupils to fence with
each other, himself standing by to criticize, correct and otherwise instruct, he
must have found the task utterly beyond his strength. Even so, it was necessary
for him to fence some six hours daily, and every day he brought arrears of
lassitude from yesterday until he was in danger of succumbing under the
increasing burden of fatigue. In the end he took an assistant to deal with
beginners, who gave the hardest work. He found him readily enough by good
fortune in one of his own pupils named Le Duc. As the summer advanced, and the
concourse of pupils steadily increased, it became necessary for him to take yet
another assistant -- an able young instructor named Galoche -- and another room
on the floor above.
They were strenuous days for Andre-Louis, more strenuous than he had ever
known, even when he had been at work to build up the Binet Company; but it
follows that they were days of extraordinary prosperity. He comments regretfully
upon the fact that Bertrand des Amis should have died by ill-chance on the very
eve of so profitable a vogue of sword-play.
The arms of the Academie du Roi, to which Andre-Louis had no title, still
continued to be displayed outside his door. He had overcome the difficulty in a
manner worthy of Scaramouche. He left the escutcheon and the legend "Academie de
Bertrand des Amis, Maitre en fait d'Armes des Academies du Roi," appending to it
the further legend: "Conducted by Andre-Louis."
With little time now in which to go abroad it was from his pupils and the
newspapers -- of which a flood had risen in Paris with the establishment of the
freedom of the Press -- that he learnt of the revolutionary processes around
him, following upon, as a measure of anticlimax, the fall of the Bastille. That
had happened whilst M. des Amis lay dead, on the day before they buried him, and
was indeed the chief reason of the delay in his burial. It was an event that had
its inspiration in that ill-considered charge of Prince Lambesc in which the
fencing-master had been killed.
The outraged people had besieged the electors in the Hotel de Ville,
demanding arms with which to defend their lives from these foreign murderers
hired by despotism. And in the end the electors had consented to give them arms,
or, rather -- for arms it had none to give -- to permit them to arm themselves.
Also it had given them a cockade, of red and blue, the colours of Paris. Because
these colours were also those of the liveries of the Duke of Orleans, white was
added to them -- the white of the ancient standard of France -- and thus was the
tricolour born. Further, a permanent committee of electors was appointed to
watch over public order.
Thus empowered the people went to work with such good effect that within
thirty-six hours sixty thousand pikes had been forged. At nine o'clock on
Tuesday morning thirty thousand men were before the Invalides. By eleven o'clock
they had ravished it of its store of arms amounting to some thirty thousand
muskets, whilst others had seized the Arsenal and possessed themse1ves of
powder.
Thus they prepared to resist the attack that from seven points was to be
launched that evening upon the city. But Paris did not wait for the attack. It
took the initiative. Mad with enthusiasm it conceived the insane project of
taking that terrible menacing fortress, the Bastille, and, what is more, it
succeeded, as you know, before five o'clock that night, aided in the enterprise
by the French Guards with cannon.
The news of it, borne to Versailles by Lambesc in flight with his dragoons
before the vast armed force that had sprouted from the paving-stones of Paris,
gave the Court pause. The people were in possession of the guns captured from
the Bastille. They were erecting barricades in the streets, and mounting these
guns upon them. The attack had been too long delayed. It must be abandoned since
now it could lead only to fruitless slaughter that must further shake the
already sorely shaken prestige of Royalty.
And so the Court, growing momentarily wise again under the spur of fear,
preferred to temporize. Necker should be brought back yet once again, the three
orders should sit united as the National Assembly demanded. It was the
completest surrender of force to force, the only argument. The King went alone
to inform the National Assembly of that eleventh-hour resolve, to the great
comfort of its members, who viewed with pain and alarm the dreadful state of
things in Paris. "No force but the force of reason and argument" was their
watchword, and it was so to continue for two years yet, with a patience and
fortitude in the face of ceaseless provocation to which insufficient justice has
been done.
As the King was leaving the Assembly, a woman, embracing his knees, gave
tongue to what might well be the question of all France:
"Ah, sire, are you really sincere? Are you sure they will not make you change
your mind?"
Yet no such question was asked when a couple of days later the King, alone
and unguarded save by the representatives of the Nation, came to Paris to
complete the peacemaking, the surrender of Privilege. The Court was filled with
terror by the adventure. Were they not the "enemy," these mutinous Parisians?
And should a King go thus among his enemies? If he shared some of that fear, as
the gloom of him might lead us to suppose, he must have found it idle. What if
two hundred thousand men under arms -- men without uniforms and with the most
extraordinary motley of weapons ever seen -- awaited him? They awaited him as a
guard of honour.
Mayor Bailly at the barrier presented him with the keys of the city. "These
are the same keys that were presented to Henri IV. He had reconquered his
people. Now the people have reconquered their King."
At the Hotel de Ville Mayor Bailly offered him the new cockade, the
tricoloured symbol of constitutional France, and when he had given his royal
confirmation to the formation of the Garde Bourgeoise and to the appointments of
Bailly and Lafayette, he departed again for Versailles amid the shouts of "Vive
le Roi!" from his loyal people.
And now you see Privilege -- before the cannon's mouth, as it were --
submitting at last, where had they submitted sooner they might have saved oceans
of blood -- chiefly their own. They come, nobles and clergy, to join the
National Assembly, to labour with it upon this constitution that is to
regenerate France. But the reunion is a mockery -- as much a mockery as that of
the Archbishop of Paris singing the Te Deum for the fall of the Bastille -- most
grotesque and incredible of all these grotesque and incredible events. All that
has happened to the National Assembly is that it has introduced five or six
hundred enemies to hamper and hinder its deliberations.
But all this is an oft-told tale, to be read in detail elsewhere. I give you
here just so much of it as I have found in Andre-Louis' own writings, almost in
his own words, reflecting the changes that were operated in his mind. Silent
now, he came fully to believe in those things in which he had not believed when
earlier he had preached them.
Meanwhile together with the change in his fortune had come a change in his
position towards the law, a change brought about by the other changes wrought
around him. No longer need he hide himself. Who in these days would prefer
against him the grotesque charge of sedition for what he had done in Brittany?
What court would dare to send him to the gallows for having said in advance what
all France was saying now? As for that other possible charge of murder, who
should concern himself with the death of the miserable Binet killed by him --
if, indeed, he had killed him, as he hoped -- in self-defence.
And so one fine day in early August, Andre-Louis gave himself a holiday from
the academy, which was now working smoothly under his assistants, hired a chaise
and drove out to Versailles to the café d'Amaury, which he knew for the
meeting-place of the Club Breton, the seed from which was to spring that Society
of the Friends of the Constitution better known as the Jacobins. He went to seek
Le Chapelier, who had been one of the founders of the club, a man of great
prominence now, president of the Assembly in this important season when it was
deliberating upon the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Le Chapelier's importance was reflected in the sudden servility of the
shirt-sleeved, white-aproned waiter of whom Andre-Louis inquired for the
representative.
M. Le Chapelier was above-stairs with friends. The waiter desired to serve
the gentleman, but hesitated to break in upon the assembly in which M. le Depute
found himself.
Andre-Louis gave him a piece of silver to encourage him to make the attempt.
Then he sat down at a marble-topped table by the window looking out over the
wide tree-encircled square. There, in that common-room of the café, deserted at
this hour of mid-afternoon, the great man came to him. Less than a year ago he
had yielded precedence to Andre-Louis in a matter of delicate leadership; to-day
he stood on the heights, one of the great leaders of the Nation in travail, and
Andre-Louis was deep down in the shadows of the general mass.
The thought was in the minds of both as they scanned each other, each noting
in the other the marked change that a few months had wrought. In Le Chapelier,
Andre-Louis observed certain heightened refinements of dress that went with
certain subtler refinements of countenance. He was thinner than of old, his face
was pale and there was a weariness in the eyes that considered his visitor
through a gold-rimmed spy-glass. In Andre-Louis those jaded but quick-moving
eyes of the Breton deputy noted changes even more marked. The almost constant
swordmanship of these last months had given Andre-Louis a grace of movement, a
poise, and a curious, indefinable air of dignity, of command. He seemed taller
by virtue of this, and he was dressed with an elegance which if quiet was none
the less rich. He wore a small silver-hilted sword, and wore it as if used to
it, and his black hair that Le Chapelier had never seen other than fluttering
lank about his bony cheeks was glossy now and gathered into a club. Almost he
had the air of a petit-maitre.
In both, however, the changes were purely superficial, as each was soon to
reveal to the other. Le Chapelier was ever the same direct and downright Breton,
abrupt of manner and of speech. He stood smiling a moment in mingled surprise
and pleasure; then opened wide his arms. They embraced under the awe-stricken
gaze of the waiter, who at once effaced himself.
"Andre-Louis, my friend! Whence do you drop?"
"We drop from above. I come from below to survey at close quarters one who is
on the heights."
"On the heights! But that you willed it so, it is yourself might now be
standing in my place."
"I have a poor head for heights, and I find the atmosphere too rarefied.
Indeed, you look none too well on it yourself, Isaac. You are pale."
"The Assembly was in session all last night. That is all. These damned
Privileged multiply our difficulties. They will do so until we decree their
abolition."
They sat down. "Abolition! You contemplate so much? Not that you surprise me.
You have always been an extremist."
"I contemplate it that I may save them. I seek to abolish them officially, so
as to save them from abolition of another kind at the hands of a people they
exasperate."
"I see. And the King?"
"The King is the incarnation of the Nation. We shall deliver him together
with the Nation from the bondage of Privilege. Our constitution will accomplish
it. You agree?"
Andre-Louis shrugged. "Does it matter? I am a dreamer in politics, not a man
of action. Until lately I have been very moderate; more moderate than you think.
But now almost I am a republican. I have been watching, and I have perceived
that this King is -- just nothing, a puppet who dances according to the hand
that pulls the string."
"This King, you say? What other king is possible? You are surely not of those
who weave dreams about Orleans? He has a sort of party, a following largely
recruited by the popular hatred of the Queen and the known fact that she hates
him. There are some who have thought of making him regent, some even more;
Robespierre is of the number."
"Who?" asked Andre-Louis, to whom the name was unknown.
"Robespierre -- a preposterous little lawyer who represents Arras, a shabby,
clumsy, timid dullard, who will make speeches through his nose to which nobody
listens -- an ultra-royalist whom the royalists and the Orleanists are using for
their own ends. He has pertinacity, and he insists upon being heard. He may be
listened to some day. But that he, or the others, will ever make anything of
Orleans... pish! Orleans himself may desire it, but. the man is a eunuch in
crime; he would, but he can't. The phrase is Mirabeau's."
He broke off to demand Andre-Louis' news of himself.
"You did not treat me as a friend when you wrote to me," he complained. "You
gave me no clue to your whereabouts; you represented yourself as on the verge of
destitution and withheld from me the means to come to your assistance. I have
been troubled in mind about you, Andre. Yet to judge by your appearance I might
have spared myself that. You seem prosperous, assured. Tell me of it."
Andre-Louis told him frankly all that there was to tell. "Do you know that
you are an amazement to me?" said the deputy. "From the robe to the buskin, and
now from the buskin to the sword! What will be the end of you, I wonder?"
"The gallows, probably."
"Fish! Be serious. Why not the toga of the senator in senatorial France? It
might be yours now if you had willed it so."
"The surest way to the gallows of all," laughed Andre-Louis.
At the moment Le Chapelier manifested impatience. I wonder did the phrase
cross his mind that day four years later when himself he rode in the death-cart
to the Greve.
"We are sixty-six Breton deputies in the Assembly. Should a vacancy occur,
will you act as suppleant? A word from me together with the influence of your
name in Rennes and Nantes, and the thing is done."
Andre-Louis laughed outright. "Do you know, Isaac, that I never meet you but
you seek to thrust me into politics?"
"Because you have a gift for politics. You were born for politics."
"Ah, yes -- Scaramouche in real life. I've played it on the stage. Let that
suffice. Tell me, Isaac, what news of my old friend, La Tour d'Azyr?"
"He is here in Versailles, damn him -- a thorn in the flesh of the Assembly.
They've burnt his chateau at La Tour d'Azyr. Unfortunately he wasn't in it at
the time. The flames haven't even singed his insolence. He dreams that when this
philosophic aberration is at an end, there will be serfs to rebuild it for him."
"So there has been trouble in Brittany?" Andre-Louis had become suddenly
grave, his thoughts swinging to Gavrillac.
"An abundance of it, and elsewhere too. Can you wonder? These delays at such
a time, with famine in the land? Chateaux have been going up in smoke during the
last fortnight. The peasants took their cue from the Parisians, and treated
every castle as a Bastille. Order is being restored, there as here, and they are
quieter now."
"What of Gavrillac? Do you know?"
"I believe all to be well. M. de Kercadiou was not a Marquis de La Tour
d'Azyr. He was in sympathy with his people. It is not likely that they would
injure Gavrillac. But don't you correspond with your godfather?"
"In the circumstances -- no. What you tell me would make it now more
difficult than ever, for he must account me one of those who helped to light the
torch that has set fire to so much belonging to his class. Ascertain for me that
all is well, and let me know."
"I will, at once."
At parting, when Andre-Louis was on the point of stepping into his cabriolet
to return to Paris, he sought information on another matter.
"Do you happen to know if M. de La Tour d'Azyr has married?" he asked.
"I don't; which really means that he hasn't. One would have heard of it in
the case of that exalted Privileged."
"To be sure." Andre-Louis spoke indifferently. "Au revoir, Isaac! You'll come
and see me -- 13 Rue du Hasard. Come soon."
"As soon and as often as my duties will allow. They keep me chained here at
present."
"Poor slave of duty with your gospel of liberty!"
"True! And because of that I will come. I have a duty to Brittany: to make
Omnes Omnibus one of her representatives in the National Assembly."
"That is a duty you will oblige me by neglecting," laughed Andre-Louis, and
drove away.