The Sword of Honor Part 21

At Jerome's words a light dawned upon Victoria. The Jesuit at Neroweg's banquet had recognized her in the column of the victors of the Bastille!

It was he who had pointed her out to the swords of the a.s.sa.s.sins as a Marchioness!

"As to me," quoth the Prince of Gerolstein, drawing two double-barrelled pistols from his pockets, "I shall singe the heads of four of these brigands!"

"Franz, let us see, first of all, to the defense of mother and father,"

cried Victoria; and drawing from its sheath the hunting knife which the Prince carried at his side, she gripped the weapon with a virile hand, and prepared to protect the aged man and his wife, who instinctively retreated into a corner of the room.

All this occurred with the rapidity of thought. John, who, in spite of the prayers and efforts of neighbor Jerome, had stepped out upon the landing to see what manner of men were invading the house and mounting the stairway, was immediately hurled back across the sill by Lehiron. A dozen scoundrels armed with pikes and sabers were ranged on the landing and the topmost stairs. Seizing his musket and clapping on the bayonet, John then drew near to Franz and Victoria in order to cover with his body his mother and father, who, mute and terrified, trembled at every limb. Thus ranged, the two men and Victoria prepared to meet their a.s.sailants.

Lehiron, who strode alone into the chamber, was taken aback by the resolute att.i.tude of the three. Franz, with his double-barrelled pistols, covered the intruders; Victoria, fearless, her eyes flas.h.i.+ng, held aloft her hunting-knife; and John Lebrenn stood ready to plunge his bayonet into the bandits' b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Suddenly little Rodin appeared. He slipped through Lehiron's followers, entered the room, approached the giant, made him a sign to stoop over, and then, stretching on tiptoes, whispered in his ear:

"Don't forget the papers!"

"Hush, vermin, I know what's to be done here," retorted the Hercules; and taking two steps toward John, whom he threatened with his cutla.s.s, he roared:

"Citizen Lebrenn, you play the people false! You are hiding here an aristocrat, Marchioness Aldini--there she stands--" and Lehiron designated Victoria with his weapon. "She is one of the harpies of the Austrian party. She sat last night at the board of a royalist council-feast. You are conspiring with her against the Nation. You will deliver the jade to us, and also all the papers in your house, which are claimed by justice. Quick! Or your lives shall pay the penalty."

"To the lamp-post with the n.o.blewoman! Live the Nation! Death to the traitors!" cried Lehiron's band of jackals, and brandis.h.i.+ng their pikes and swords they poured into the room. But the giant, held in awe by the pistols trained upon him and not anxious to have recourse to force except in the last extremity, waved back his brigands with a gesture and addressed himself again to John:

"Deliver up the n.o.blewoman and the papers, and your life will be spared.

But be quick about it."

"Helas! My G.o.d! Have pity on us!" murmured Madam Lebrenn, overcome with terror and throwing her arms about her blind old husband.

"Out of here, you scoundrels!" was the answer of John Lebrenn. Lehiron waved his hand to his gang of bandits and cried:

"Forward! To the lamp-post with the traitors!"

As the valiant leader of the cut-throats gave the command, he himself leaped to one side and ducked his head to escape the pistol-fire of Franz of Gerolstein. But the latter no less quickly changed the aim of his weapon, and pulled the trigger. The giant flew back almost his full length, flung out his arms, dropped his cutla.s.s, tumbled to his knees, and rolled over, face down, on the floor, almost mortally wounded.

All of a sudden, above the tumult was heard a cry of pain from Madam Lebrenn:

"Oh, the wicked child! He is biting me!"

John turned, and while his two companions fell upon their adversaries, ran to his mother and found her in a desperate struggle with little Rodin. The latter, faithful to the tuition of his dear G.o.d-father, and hoping to profit by the turmoil, was about to make off with the bundle of ma.n.u.scripts. Madam Lebrenn seized hold of him to take them away, and the little rat had bitten her savagely on the hand. To s.n.a.t.c.h from the Jesuit's G.o.d-son the treasured legends, seize him by the slack of his pantaloons, and send him rolling ten paces away, was the work of an instant for young Lebrenn. The terrible child, wriggling and sliding like a snake between the legs of John's companions, gained the stairway and escaped with his discomfited accomplices.

The attempted arrest of Victoria and theft of the legends added fuel to the fears of the family on the machinations of the Jesuits. That very day the Prince deposited in safe keeping the records and relics of the family of Lebrenn.

Two days after our interview, Charlotte Desmarais wrote to me, John Lebrenn, a letter that was touching, and in all points worthy of her.

She informed me of her departure for Lyons, whither her mother was to accompany her.

From the month of July, 1789, up till December, 1792, nothing of importance occurred in our family save the death of our beloved parents.

My father died on the 11th of August, 1789; my mother, ill for years, survived him but briefly; she expired in our arms on October 29th of the same year.

Monsieur Desmarais continues to hold his seat at the extreme Left of the National a.s.sembly, near Robespierre. He defended Marat from the tribunal, and makes one of the republican group headed by Brissot, Camille Desmoulins, Condorcet and Bonneville. Formerly a member of the Jacobin club, Desmarais later transferred his allegiance to the Cordeliers. He seemed to fear losing his popularity, which he regards as the safeguard of his property and perhaps of his life. Monsieur Hubert, differently from his brother-in-law, has the courage of his convictions; he declares frankly for the Moderates. The financier still commands the battalion of the Daughters of St. Thomas, one of the most hostile to the Revolution. Franz of Gerolstein was suddenly called to the side of his father, who had been stricken gravely ill. Our relics and legends are still in the place of security where he deposited them.

My sister Victoria shares my dwelling and lives on the proceeds of her sempstress's trade. We have promised Franz to fall back on his aid in case of necessity. I notice with disquietude the character of Victoria growing somber apace; at times her revolutionary fervor becomes wild in its exaltation. In vain I attempt to calm her, in vain I appeal to her heart, to her good sense, in order to convince her that, apart from cases of insurrection or legitimate defense, we must strike our enemies only with the sword of the law, unorganized popular justice being always blind in its execution.

"And when the sword of the law, confided to the hands of our enemies, rusts in its sheath? When treason enwraps the great criminals from justice, and insures them impunity, what shall the sovereign people do then?" Victoria asks me.

To which I reply: "The sovereign people, the source and dispenser of all power, by election, should depose its faithless officers at the expiration of their term, and, if they be traitors, send them before their natural judges. That is the rational course to pursue."

"No," my sister makes answer. "All these formalities are too slow. On certain occasions the people should exterminate its enemies in the name of public safety."

Alas, it was in the name of public safety that men, the most pure and heroic of the Revolution, were one day to smite each other down, to the profit of our eternal enemies.

Victoria did not soon again see the Count of Plouernel. Seized, in spite of his braggadocio, with panic and alarm at the taking of the Bastille, he was among the first to emigrate at the heels of the Count of Artois and the Princes of Conti and Conde. We did not set eyes on him again till 1793.

Lehiron survived his wound. Doubtless at the instigation of Abbot Morlet, he later made a similar descent, I know not for what purpose, upon an old and isolated house in St. Francois Street, in the Swamp, occupied by an aged Jew and his wife. The Voyants had for a long time held their meetings in this building. Lehiron's attempt upon it was without result, according to what the Jew later told my sister, without, however, going at all into the causes that led to it.

The interval between the months of July, 1789, and December, 1792, a period so uneventful in our private life, was nevertheless fertile in great occurrences in the life of the Nation, occurrences the importance of which was immense. I have preserved these to our family legends by means of extracts from a journal kept by me, in which, of an evening, I would inscribe the striking events observed by Victoria and myself during the day. To these notes I have often added salient pa.s.sages from the Revolutionary journals of the time--a heroic epoch which will leave its mark on the annals of the people!

PART II.

THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION.

CHAPTER I.

THE NATION INSULTED--AND AVENGED.

The taking of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, dealt a mortal blow to the power of the monarchy, the same as its influence and that of the n.o.bility and the clergy were wiped out when, upon the closing of the Tennis Court at Versailles, and braving the orders of dissolution p.r.o.nounced by Louis XVI, the deputies of the Third Estate const.i.tuted themselves a sovereign, const.i.tuent, and inviolable a.s.sembly. The results of that immortal day of the Fourteenth of July were in the highest degree advantageous to the cause of the people. The King was forced to return to Paris to render homage to the popular victory, and threw off the white c.o.c.kade for the new national tricolor, blue, white, and red.

The fall of the Bastille re-echoed throughout France. Everywhere the people and the bourgeoisie of the towns rose against the representatives of the royal power, and replaced them with munic.i.p.al governors elected by the citizens.

This general insurrection against royalty, and against the privileges of n.o.bility and clergy, threw into affright the Right side of the National a.s.sembly, where sat the most violent antagonists of the Revolution.

The Center of the a.s.sembly, called by turns the Plain and the Swamp, had no settled convictions whatsoever. The Left was almost entirely composed of the deputies of the Third Estate, among whom, famous for their eloquence, were Sieyes, Duport, and Barnave. On this side also were some few scattering representatives of the n.o.bility, such as the Duke of Orleans, the Marquis of Lafayette, the Lameths, and, most ill.u.s.trious of all, the elder Mirabeau, a magnificent orator, but corrupt in his private life. At the extreme Left sat a deputy, then obscure and next to unknown, but destined soon to become the incarnation of the French Revolution. 'Twas Maximilien Robespierre, attorney at the bar of Arras.

In one single night, the night of the 4th of August, 1789, the old feudal edifice crumbled before the determined att.i.tude of the nation. O, sons of Joel, let us glorify the memory of our obscure ancestors, who prepared the triumph of the Revolution.

The imperishable work of the National a.s.sembly was the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This monumental doc.u.ment embraced territorial and administrative unity; social, civil, political and religious equality; and above all, the formal recognition of the sovereignty of the people as the source of all power and of all functions, which it delegated to its representatives by election. Nevertheless we must admit that the Const.i.tution of 1789-1791 lacked much that it should have contained, and contained much which it would have been better without. Such, for instance, were its several breaches of the sovereignty of the people, like the distinction drawn between "active" and "pa.s.sive" citizens, the two-degree election, and the requirement of a certain amount of direct taxation to qualify one for election as a representative. The Convention later corrected these injustices; but it must be noted that the Const.i.tution of 1789-91 made no provision for the rights of women. Our Gallic fathers admitted women into their city councils, even when the deliberations turned on matters of war. Equality of civil and political rights for men and women should have figured at the very head of the Const.i.tution. The question of marriage should there have been taken up and established as a matter of free unions, ruled by mutual tastes and agreements. Property should also have been reorganized, and declared collective in the state, the department, the district, or the commune, according to its nature, and no individual should have possessed more than a temporary t.i.tle to the instrument of labor or the plot of ground which he needed for his support, and which should have been a.s.signed to him gratuitously by the commune. The abolition of inheritance would have logically followed, and the suppression of interest on capital. A system of free, compulsory, and nonsectarian education should have been proclaimed, and also the right to a.s.sistance during youth, old age, illness or unemployment.

However that may be, and in spite of the regrettable omissions in the Const.i.tution, honor to the labors of the legislators of '79. The clergy, the n.o.bility, the monarchy, smitten in their prestige, in their property, in their privileges, and in their temporal authority, received their death blow. The National a.s.sembly inaugurated the era of enfranchis.e.m.e.nt. It could, with good right, date its work the Year I of Liberty. But we must not forget that it was the revolutionary att.i.tude of the populace of Paris at the attack on the Bastille, that ushered in our freedom.

But a fact often before made manifest, almost one century after another, was now once more to come into play. The royal power, forced to grant concessions, sought only how best to elude or annul them, employing to this end, each in its turn, perfidy, perjury, and violence!

Soon the hostility of the court showed itself in the open. Louis XVI refused to sanction the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the corner-stone and basis of the Const.i.tution, and opposed his veto to the law attaching for sale the goods of the clergy. Thereupon, projects fatal to liberty began to rear their heads with unheard-of insolence. On October 1, 1789, the foreign troops were summoned to Versailles. The Body Guard bespoke to a banquet the newly arrived officers, together with those of the Montmorency Dragoons, the Swiss regiments, the Hundred-Swiss, the mounted Police, and the Mayor's Guard. Several monarchical captains, picked out from among the National Guard of Versailles, were also invited. The officers of the army, instead of wearing the national tricolored c.o.c.kade, affectatiously displayed enormous c.o.c.kades of white. The Court was tendering to the Army a sumptuous banquet, the expenses of which were paid by the King. The tables were spread in the Opera Hall of the palace, which was brilliantly lighted. The bands of the Flanders regiment and the Body Guard played during the repast royalist or topical airs, such as "Long Live Henry IV," or "O Richard, O My King, the World Is All Forsaking Thee." The wine, liberally distributed, rose to all heads. They drained their b.u.mpers to the health of the royal family; one captain of the National Guard proposed the health of the Nation; he was drowned with hoots.

Soon the officers called in their soldiers, who were ma.s.sed in all the alcoves. Then the King entered the hall in a hunting habit, accompanied by the Queen, who held the Dauphin by the hand. At the sight of Louis XVI, the officers were transported with enthusiasm. The German regimental band struck up the "March of the Uhlans," a foreign war song.

The drunkenness rose to frenzy. Insults and b.l.o.o.d.y threats were hurled against the Revolution, against the a.s.sembly. The cavalry trumpets sounded the charge. The officers whipped out their sabers to cries of "Long live the King!" The tricolored c.o.c.kade was trampled under foot.