The Royal Life Guard; or, the flight of the royal family.
He carried a brace of pistols in his sash girdle and a sabre hung by his side.
Almost breathless as he opened the door, he appeared relieved only when he saw the Royal Family. A smile of vengeance flittered over his face and without troubling about the other persons around the room and by the doorway itself, which he almost blocked up with his massive form, he thundered as he stretched out his hand:
"In the name of the National Assembly, you are all my prisoners!"
As swift as thought Choiseul sprang forward with a pistol in hand and offered to blow out the brains of this intruder, who seemed to surpass in insolence and resolution all they had met before. But the Queen stopped the menacing hand with a still swifter action and said in an undertone to the count:
"Do not hasten our ruin! prudence, my lord! let us gain time for Bouille to arrive."
"You are right," said Choiseul, putting up the firearm.
The Queen glanced at Charny whom she had thought would have been the first to intervene: but, astonishing thing! Charny seemed not to want the new-comer to notice him, and shrank into the darkest corner apparently in that end.
But she did not doubt him or that he would step out of the mystery and shadow at the proper time.
The threatening move of the nobleman against the representative of the National Assembly had passed over without the latter appearing to remark his escape from death.
Besides, another emotion than fear seemed to monopolize his heart: there was no mistaking his face's expression; so looks the hunter who has tracked to the den of the lion, the lioness and their cubs, with their jackals, – amongst whom was devoured his only child!
But the King had winced at the word "Prisoners," which had made Choiseul revolt.
"Prisoners, in the name of the Assembly? what do you mean? I do not understand you."
"It is plain, and easy enough," replied the man. "In spite of the oath you took not to go out of France, you have fled in the night, betraying your pledge, the Nation and the people; hence the nation have cried 'To arms!' risen, and to say: – by the voice of one of your lowest subjects, not less powerful because it comes from below, though: 'Sire, in the name of the people, the nation and the National Assembly, you are my prisoner!"
In the adjoining room, a cheer burst at the words.
"My lady," said Choiseul to the Queen, in her ear, "do not forget that you stopped me and that you would not suffer this insult if your pity had not interfered for this bully."
"It will go for nothing if we are revenged," she replied.
"But if not?"
She could only groan hollowly and painfully. But Charny's hand was slowly reached over the duke's shoulder and touched the Queen's arm. She turned quickly.
"Let that man speak and act – I answer for him," said the count.
Meanwhile the monarch, stunned by the fresh blow dealt him, stared with amazement at the gloomy figure which had spoken so energetic a language, and curiosity was mingled with it from his belief that he had seen him before.
"Well, in short, what do you want? Speak," he said.
"Sire, I am here to prevent you and the Royal Family taking another step towards the frontier."
"I suppose you come with thousands of men to oppose my march," went on the King, who became grander during his discussion.
"No, Sire, I am alone, or with only another, General Lafayette's aid-de-camp, sent by him and the Assembly to have the orders of the Nation executed. I am sent by Mayor Bailly, but I come mainly on my own behalf to watch this envoy and blow out his brains if he flinches."
All the hearers looked at him with astonishment; they had never seen the commoners but oppressed or furious, and begging for pardon or murdering all before them; for the first time they beheld a man of the people upright, with folded arms, feeling his force and speaking in the name of his rights.
Louis saw quickly that nothing was to be hoped from one of this metal and said in his eagerness to finish with him:
"Where is your companion?"
"Here he is, behind me," said he, stepping forward so as to disclose the doorway, where might be seen a young man in staff-officer's uniform, who was leaning against the window. He was also in disorder but it was of fatigue not force. His face looked mournful. He held a paper in his hand.
This was Captain Romeuf, Lafayette's aid, a sincere patriot, but during Lafayette's dictature while he was superintending the Tuileries, he had shown so much respectful delicacy that the Queen had thanked him on several occasions.
"Oh, it is you?" she exclaimed, painfully surprised. "I never should have believed it," she added, with the painful groan of a beauty who feels her fancied invincible power failing.
"Good, it looks as if I were quite right to come," muttered the second deputy, smiling.
The impatient King did not give the young officer time to present his warrant; he took a step towards him rapidly and snatched it from his hands.
"There is no longer a King in France," he uttered after having read it.
The companion of Romeuf smiled as much as to say: "I knew that all along."
The Queen moved towards the King to question him at these words.
"Listen, madam," he said, "to the decree the Assembly has presumed to issue."
In a voice shaking with indignation he read the following lines:
"It is hereby ordered by the Assembly that the Home Secretary shall send instantly messengers into every department with the order for all functionaries, National Guards, and troops of the line in the country to arrest or have arrested all persons soever attempting to leave the country, as well as to prevent all departure of goods, arms, ammunition, gold and silver, horses and vehicles; and in case these messengers overtake the King, or any members of the Royal Family, and those who connive at their absconding, the said functionaries, National Guards and troops of the line are to take, and hereby are bound to take, all measure possible to check the said absconding, prevent the absconders continuing their route, and give an account immediately to the House of Representatives."
The Queen listened in torpor – but when the King finished she shook her head to arouse her wits and said:
"Impossible – give it to me," and she held out her hand for the fatal message.
In the meantime Romeuf's companion was encouraging the National Guards and patriots of Varennes with a smile.
Though they had heard the tenor of the missive the Queen's expression of "Impossible!" had startled them.
"Read, Madam, and if still you doubt," said the King with bitterness; "it is written and signed by the Speaker of the House."
"What man dares write and sign such impudence?"
"A peer of the realm – the Marquis of Beauharnais."
Is it not a strange thing, which proves how events are mysteriously linked together, that the decree stopping Louis in his flight should bear a name, obscure up to then, yet about to be attached in a brilliant manner with the history of the commencement of the 19th Century?
The Queen read the paper, frowning. The King took it to re-peruse it and then tossed it aside so carelessly that it fell on the sleeping prince and princess's couch. At this, the Queen, incapable of self-constraint any longer, rose quickly with an angry roar, and seizing the paper, crushed it up in her grip before throwing it afar, with the words:
"Be careful, my lord – I would not have such a filthy rag sully my children."
A deafening clamor arose from the next room, and the Guards made a movement to rush in upon the illustrious fugitives. Lafayette's aid let a cry of apprehension escape him. His companion uttered one of wrath.
"Ha," he growled between his teeth, "is it thus you insult the Assembly, the Nation and the people? – very well, we shall see! Come, citizens!" he called out, turning to the men without, already excited by the contest, and armed with guns, scythes mounted on poles like spears, and swords.
They were taking the second stride to enter the room and Heaven only knows what would have been the shock of two such enmities, had not Charny sprang forward. He had kept aloof during the scene, and now grasping the National Guards man by the wrist as he was about to draw his sabre, he said:
"A word with you, Farmer Billet; I want to speak with you."
Billet, for it was he, emitted a cry of astonishment, turned pale as death, stood irresolute for an instant, and then said as he sheathed the half-drawn steel:
"Have it so. I have to speak with you, Lord Charny." He proceeded to the door and said: "Citizens, make room if you please. I have to confer with this officer; but have no uneasiness," he added in a low voice, "there shall not escape one wolf, he or she, or yet a whelp. I am on the lookout and I answer for them!"
As if this man had the right to give them orders, though he was unknown to them all – save Charny – they backed out and left the inner room free. Besides, each was eager to relate to those without what had happened inside, and enjoin all patriots to keep close watch.
In the meantime Charny whispered to the Queen:
"Romeuf is a friend of yours; I leave him with you – get the utmost from him."
This was the more easy as Charny closed the door behind him to prevent anybody, even Billet, entering.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE FEUD
The two men, on facing each other, looked without the nobleman making the plebeian cower. More than that, it was the latter who spoke the first.
"The count does me the honor to say he wants to speak with me. I am waiting for him to be good enough to do so."
"Billet," began Charny, "how comes it that you are here on an errand of vengeance? I thought you were the friend of your superiors the nobles, and, besides, a faithful and sound subject of his Majesty."
"I was all that, count: I was your most humble servant – for I cannot say your friend, in as much as such an honor is not vouchsafed to a farmer like me. But you may see that I am nothing of the kind at present."
"I do not follow you, Billet."
"Why need you? am I asking you the reason for your fidelity to the King, and your standing true to the Queen? No, I presume you have your reasons for doing this, and as you are a good and wise gentleman I expect your reasons are sound or at least meet for your conscience. I am not in your high position, count, and have not your learning; but you know, or you have heard I am accounted an honest and sensible man, and you may suppose that, like yourself, I have my reasons – suiting my conscience, if not good."
"Billet, I used to know you as far different from what you are now," said Charny, totally unaware of the farmer's grounds for hatred against royalty and nobility.
"Oh, certainly I am not going to deny that you saw me unlike this," replied Billet, with a bitter smile. "I do not mind telling you, count, how this is: I was a true lover of my country, devoted to one thing and two persons: the men were the King and Dr. Gilbert – the thing, my native-land. One day the King's men – I confess that this began to set me against him," said the farmer, shaking his head, "broke into my house and stole away a casket, half by surprise, half by force, a precious trust left me by Dr. Gilbert.
"As soon as I was free I started for Paris, where I arrived on the evening of the thirteenth of July. It was right in the thick of the riot over the busts of Necker and the Duke of Orleans. Fellows were carrying them about the street, with cheers for those two, doing no harm to the King, when the royal soldiers charged upon us. I saw poor chaps, who had committed no offense but shouting for persons they had probably never seen, fall around me, some with their skulls laid open with sabre slashes, others with their breasts bored by bullets. I saw Prince Lambesq, a friend of the King, drive women and children inside the Tuileries gardens, who had shouted for nobody, and trample under his horse's hoofs an old man. This set me still more against the King.
"Next day I went to the boarding school where Dr. Gilbert's son Sebastian was kept, and learnt from the poor lad that his father was locked up in the Bastile on a King's order sued for by a lady of the court. So I said to myself, this King, whom they call kind, has moments when he errs, blunders or is ignorant, and I ought to amend one of the faults the King so makes – which I proposed to do by contributing all my power to destroying the Bastile. We managed that – not without its being a tough job, for the soldiers of the King fired on us, and killed some two hundred of us which gave me a fresh wrinkle on the kindness of the King. But in short, we took the Bastile. In one of its dungeons I found Dr. Gilbert, for whom I had risked death a hundred times, and the joy of finding him made me forget that and a lot more. Besides, he was the first to tell me that the King was kind, ignorant for the most part of the shameful deeds perpetrated in his name, and that one must not bear him a grudge but cast it on his ministers. Now, as all that Dr. Gilbert said at that time was Gospel, I believed Dr. Gilbert.
"The Bastile being captured, Dr. Gilbert safe and free, and Pitou and myself all well, I forgot the charges in the Tuileries garden, the shooting in the street, the two hundred men slain by Marshal Saxe's sackbut, which is or was a gun on the Bastile ramparts, and the imprisonment of my friend on the mere application of a court dame. But, pardon me, count," Billet interrupted himself, "all this is no concern of yours, and you cannot have asked to speak with me to hear the babble of a poor uneducated rustic – you who are both a high noble and learned gentleman."
He made a move to lay hold of the doorknob and re-enter the other room. But Charny stopped him for two reasons, the first that it might be important to learn why Billet acted thus, and again, to gain time.
"No; tell me the whole story, my dear Billet," he said; "you know the interest my poor brothers and I always bore you, and what you say engages me in a high degree."
Billet smiled bitterly at the words "My poor brothers."
"Well, then," he replied, "I will tell you all; with regret that your poor brothers – particularly Lord Isidore, are not here to hear me."
This was spoken with such singular intonation that the count repressed the feeling of grief the mention of Isidore's name had aroused in his soul, and he waved his hand for the farmer to continue, as Billet was evidently ignorant of what had happened the viscount whose presence he desired.
"Hence," proceeded the yeoman, "when the King returned to Paris from Versailles, I saw in it sheerly the return home of a father among his children. I walked with Dr. Gilbert beside the royal carriage, making a breastwork for those within it of my body, and shouting 'Long live the King!' to split the ear. This was the first journey of the King: blessings and flowers were all around him. On arriving at the City Hall it was noticed that he did not wear the white cockade of his fathers, but he had not yet donned the tricolored one. So I plucked mine from my hat and gave it him as they were roaring he must sport it, and therefore he thanked me, to the cheering of the crowd. I was wild with glee at the King wearing my own favor and I shouted Long Life to him louder than anybody.
"I was so enthusiastic about our good King that I wanted to stay in town. My harvest was ripe and cried for me; but pooh, what mattered a harvest? I was rich enough to lose one season and it was better for me to stay beside this good King to be useful, this Father of the People, this Restorer of French Liberty, as we dunces called him at the time. I lost pretty near all the harvest because I trusted it to Catherine, who had something else to look after than my wheat. Let us say no more on that score.
"Still, it was said that the King had not quite fairly agreed to the change in things, that he moved forced and constrained; that he might wear the tricolor cockade in his hat but the white one was in his heart. They were slanderers who said this; it was clearly proved that at the Guards' Banquet, the Queen put on neither the national nor the French cockade but the black one of her brother the Austrian Emperor. I own that this made my doubts revive; but as Dr. Gilbert pointed out, 'Billet, it is not the King who did this but the Queen; and the Queen being a woman, one must be indulgent towards a woman.' I believed this so deeply that, when the ruffians came from Paris to attack the Versailles Palace, though I did not hold them wholly in the wrong – it was I who ran to rouse General Lafayette – who was in the sleep of the blessed, poor dear man! and brought him on the field in time to save the Royal Family.
"On that night I saw Lady Elizabeth hug General Lafayette and the Queen give him her hand to kiss, while the King called him his friend, and I said to myself, says I: 'Upon my faith, I believe Dr. Gilbert is right. Surely, not from fear would such high folks make such a show of gratitude, and they would not play a lie if they did not share this hero's opinions, howsoever useful he may be at this pinch to them all.' Again I pitied the poor Queen, who had only been rash, and the poor King, only feeble; but I let them go back to Paris without me – I had better to do at Versailles. You know what, Count Charny!"
The Lifeguardsman uttered a sigh recalling the death of his brother Valence.
"I heard that this second trip to the town was not as merry as the former," continued Billet; "instead of blessings, curses were showered down; instead of shouts of Long Live! those of Death to the lot! instead of bouquets under the horses hoofs and carriage wheels, dead men's heads carried on spear-points. I don't know, not being there, as I stayed at Versailles. Still I left the farm without a master, but pshaw! I was rich enough to lose another harvest after that of '89! But, one fine morning, Pitou arrived to announce that I was on the brink of losing something dearer which no father is rich enough to lose: his daughter!"
Charny started, but the other only looked at him fixedly as he went on:
"I must tell you, lord, that a league off from us, at Boursonne, lives a noble family of mighty lords, terribly rich. Three brothers were the family. When they were boys and used to come over to Villers Cotterets, the two younger of the three were wont to stop on my place, doing me the honor to say that they never drank sweeter milk than my cows gave, or eaten finer bread than my wife made, and, from time to time they would add – I believing they just said it in payment of my good cheer – ass that I was! that they had never seen a prettier lass than my Catherine. Lord bless you, I thanked them for drinking the milk, and eating the bread, and finding my child so pretty into the bargain! What would you? as I believed in the King, though he is half a German by the mother's side, I might believe in noblemen who were wholly French.
"So, when the youngest of all, Valence, who had been away from our parts for a long time, was killed at Versailles, before the Queen's door, on the October Riot night, bravely doing his duty as a nobleman, what a blow that was to me! His brother saw me on my knees before the body, shedding almost as many tears as he shed blood – his eldest brother, I mean, who never came to my house, not because he was too proud, I will do him that fair play, but because he was sent to foreign parts while young. I think I can still see him in the damp courtyard, where I carried the poor young fellow in my arms so that he should not be hacked to pieces, like his comrades, whose blood so dyed me that I was almost as reddened as yourself, Lord Charny. He was a pretty boy, whom I still see riding to school on his little dappled pony, with a basket on his arm – and thinking of him thus, I think I can mourn him like yourself, my lord. But I think of the other, and I weep no more," said Billet.
"The other? what do you mean." cried the count.
"Wait, we are coming to it," was the reply. "Pitou had come to Paris, and let a couple of words drop to show that it was not my crops so much in danger as my child – not my fortune but my happiness. So I left the King to shift for himself in the city. Since he meant the right thing, as Dr. Gilbert assured me, all would go for the best, whether I was at hand or not, and I returned on my farm.
"I believed that Catherine had brain fever or something I would not understand, but was only in danger of death. The condition in which I found her made me uneasy, all the more as the doctor forbade me the room till she was cured. The poor father in despair, not allowed to go into the sickroom, could not help hanging round the door. Yes, I listened. Then I learnt that she was at death's point almost out of her senses with fever, mad because her lover – her gallant, not her sweetheart, see! had gone away. A year before, I had gone away, but she had smiled on my going instead of grieving. My going left her free to meet her gallant!
"Catherine returned to health but not to gladness! a month, two, three, six months passed without a single beam of joy kissing the face which my eyes never quitted. One morning I saw her smile and shuddered. Was not her lover coming back that she should smile? Indeed a shepherd who had seen him prowling about, a year before, told me that he had arrived that morning. I did not doubt that he would come over on my ground that evening or rather on the land where Catherine was mistress. I loaded up my gun at dark and laid in wait – "
"You did this, Billet?" queried Charny.
"Why not?" retorted the farmer. "I lay in wait right enough for the wild boar coming to make mush of my potatoes, the wolf to tear my lambs' throats, the fox to throttle my fowls, and am I not to lay in wait for the villain who comes to disgrace my daughter?"
"But your heart failed you at the test, Billet, I hope," said the count.
"No, not the heart, but the eye and the hand," said the other: "A track of blood showed me that I had not wholly missed, only you may understand that a defamed maid had not wavered between father and scoundrel – when I entered the house, Catherine had disappeared."
"And you have not seen her since?"
"No. Why should I see her? she knows right well that I should kill her on sight."
Charny shrank back in terror mingled with admiration for the massive character confronting him.
"I retook the work on the farm," proceeded the farmer. "What concern of mine was my misfortune if France were only happy? Was not the King marching steadily in the road of Revolution? was he not to take his part in the Federation? might I not see him again whom I had saved in October and sheltered with my own cockade? what a pleasure it must be for him to see all France gathered on the parade-ground at Paris, swearing like one man the Unity of the country!
"So, for a space, while I saw him, I forgot all, even to Catherine – no, I lie – no father forgets his child! He also took the oath. It seemed to me that he swore clumsily, evasively, from his seat, instead of at the Altar of the Country, but what did that matter? the main thing was that he did swear. An oath is an oath. It is not the place where he takes it that makes it holy, and when an honest man takes an oath, he keeps it. So the King should keep his word. But it is true that when I got home to Villers Cotterets, – having no child now, I attended to politics – I heard say that the King was willing to have Marquis Favras carry him off but the scheme had fallen through; that the King had tried to flee with his aunts, but that had failed; that he wanted to go out to St. Cloud, whence he would have hurried off to Rouen, but that the people prevented him leaving town. I heard all this but I did not believe it. Had I not with my own eyes seen the King hold up his hand to high heaven on the Paris Parade-ground and swear to maintain the nation? How could I believe that a king, having sworn in the presence of three hundred thousand citizens, would not hold his pledge to be as sacred as that of other men? It was not likely!
"Hence, as I was at Meaux Market yesterday, – I may as well say I was sleeping at the postmaster's house, with whom I had made a grain deal – I was astonished to see in a carriage changing horses at my friend's door, the King, the Queen and the Dauphin! There was no mistaking them; I was in the habit of seeing them in a coach; on the sixteenth of July, I accompanied them from Versailles to Paris. I heard one of the party say: 'The Chalons Road!' This man in a buff waistcoat had a voice I knew; I turned and recognized – who but the gentleman who had stolen away my daughter! This noble was doing his duty by playing the flunky before his master's coach."
