The Conspirators

In about an hour, of which it must be confessed Bathilde passed three-quarters with her eyes fixed on the paper, Nanette entered. Bathilde, without moving, told her to shut the window – Nanette obeyed; but in returning she saw the paper.

"What is that?" asked she, stooping down to pick it up.

"Nothing," answered Bathilde quickly, forgetting that Nanette could not read, "only a paper which has fallen out of my pocket." Then, after an instant's pause, and with a visible effort, "and which you may throw on the fire," continued she. – "But perhaps it may be something important; see what it is, at all events, mademoiselle." And Nanette presented the letter to Bathilde.

The temptation was too strong to resist. Bathilde cast her eyes on the paper, affecting an air of indifference as well as she could, and read as follows:

"They say you are an orphan: I have no parents; we are, then, brother and sister before God. This evening I run a great danger; but I hope to come out of it safe and sound if my sister – Bathilde – will pray for her brother Raoul."

"You are right," said Bathilde, in a moved voice, and taking the paper from the hands of Nanette, "that paper is more important than I thought;" and she put D'Harmental's letter in the pocket of her apron. Five minutes after Nanette, who came in twenty times a day without any particular reason, went out as she had entered, and left Bathilde alone.

Bathilde had only just glanced at the letter, and it had seemed to dazzle her. As soon as Nanette was gone she read it a second time.

It would have been impossible to have said more in fewer words. If D'Harmental had taken a whole day to combine every word of the billet, instead of writing on the spur of the moment, he could not have done it better. Indeed, he established a similarity of position between himself and the orphan; he interested Bathilde in her neighbor's fate on account of a menacing danger, a danger which would appear all the greater to the young girl from her not knowing its nature; and, finally, the expression brother and sister, so skillfully glided in at the end, and to ask a simple prayer, excluded from these first advances all idea of love.

It followed, therefore, that, if at this moment Bathilde had found herself vis-a-vis with D'Harmental, instead of being embarrassed and blushing, as a young girl would who had just received her first love-letter, she would have taken him by the hand and said to him, smiling – "Be satisfied, I will pray for you." There remained, however, on the mind of Bathilde something more dangerous than all the declarations in the world, and that was the idea of the peril which her neighbor ran. By a sort of presentiment with which she had been seized on seeing him, with a face so different from his ordinary expression, nail the crimson ribbon to his window, and withdraw it directly the captain entered, she was almost sure that the danger was somehow connected with this new personage, whom she had never seen before. But how did this danger concern him? What was the nature of the danger itself? This was what she asked herself in vain. She thought of a duel, but to a man such as the chevalier appeared to be, a duel was not one of those dangers for which one asks the prayers of women; besides, the hour named was not suitable to duels. Bathilde lost herself in her conjectures; but, in losing herself, she thought of the chevalier, always of the chevalier, and of nothing but the chevalier; and, if he had calculated upon such an effect, it must be owned that his calculations were wofully true for poor Bathilde.

The day passed; and, whether it was intentional, or whether it was that he was otherwise employed, Bathilde saw him no more, and his window remained closed. When Buvat came home as usual, at ten minutes after four, he found the young girl so much preoccupied that, although his perspicacity was not great in such matters, he asked her three or four times if anything was wrong; each time she answered by one of those smiles which supplied Buvat with enough to do in looking at her; and it followed that, in spite of these repeated questions, Bathilde kept her secret.

After dinner M. Chaulieu's servant entered – he came to ask Buvat to spend the evening with his master. The Abbe Chaulieu was one of Buvat's best patrons, and often came to his house, for he had taken a great liking for Bathilde. The poor abbe became blind, but not so entirely as not to be able to recognize a pretty face; though it is true that he saw it across a cloud. The abbe had told Bathilde, in his sexagenarian gallantry, that his only consolation was that it is thus that one sees the angels.

Bathilde thanked the good abbe from the bottom of her heart for thus getting her an evening's solitude. She knew that when Buvat went to the Abbe Chaulieu he ordinarily stayed some time; she hoped, then, that he would stop late as usual. Poor Buvat went out, without imagining that for the first time she desired his absence.

Buvat was a lounger, as every bourgeois of Paris ought to be. From one end to the other of the Palais Royal, he stared at the shops, stopping for the thousandth time before the things which generally drew his attention. On leaving the colonnade, he heard singing, and saw a group of men and women, who were listening to the songs; he joined them, and listened too. At the moment of the collection he went away, not from a bad heart, nor that he would have wished to refuse the admirable musician the reward which was his due, but that by an old habit, of which time had proved the advantage, he always came out without money, so that by whatever he was tempted he was sure to overcome the temptation. This evening he was much tempted to drop a sou into the singer's bowl, but as he had not a sou in his pocket, he was obliged to go away. He made his way then, as we have seen, toward the Barriere des Sergents, passed up the Rue du Coq, crossed the Pont-Neuf, returned along the quay so far as the Rue Mazarine; it was in the Rue Mazarine that the Abbe Chaulieu lived.

The Abbe Chaulieu recognized Buvat, whose excellent qualities he had appreciated during their two years' acquaintance, and with much pressing on his part, and many difficulties on Buvat's, made him sit down near himself, before a table covered with papers. It is true that at first Buvat sat on the very edge of his chair; gradually, however, he got further and further on – put his hat on the ground – took his cane between his legs, and found himself sitting almost like any one else.

The work that there was to be done did not promise a short sitting; there were thirty or forty poems on the table to be classified – numbered, and, as the abbe's servant was his amanuensis, corrected; so that it was eleven o'clock before they thought that it had struck nine. They had just finished and Buvat rose, horrified at having to come home at such an hour. It was the first time such a thing had ever happened to him; he rolled up the manuscript, tied it with a red ribbon, which had probably served as a sash to Mademoiselle de Launay, put it in his pocket, took his cane, picked up his hat, and left the house, abridging his leave-taking as much as possible. To add to his misfortunes there was no moonlight, the night was cloudy. Buvat regretted not having two sous in his pocket to cross the ferry which was then where now stands the Pont des Arts; but we have already explained Buvat's theory to our readers, and he was obliged to return as he had come – by the Quai Conti, the Rue Pont-Neuf, the Rue du Coq, and the Rue Saint Honoré.

Everything had gone right so far, and except the statue of Henri IV. of which Buvat had forgotten either the existence or the place, and which had frightened him terribly, and the Samaritaine, which, fifty steps off, had struck the half-hour without any preparation, the noise of which had made poor belated Buvat tremble from head to foot, he had run no real peril, but on arriving at the Rue des Bons Enfants things took a different look. In the first place, the aspect of the street itself, long, narrow, and only lighted by two flickering lanterns in the whole length, was not reassuring, and this evening it had to Buvat a very singular appearance; he did not know whether he was asleep or awake; he fancied that he saw before him some fantastic vision, such as he had heard told of the old Flemish sorceries; the streets seemed alive – the posts seemed to oppose themselves to his passage – the recesses of the doors whispered to each other – men crossed like shadows from one side of the street to the other; at last, when he had arrived at No. 24, he was stopped, as we have seen, by the chevalier and the captain. It was then that D'Harmental had recognized him, and had protected him against the first impulse of Roquefinette, inviting him to continue his route as quickly as possible. There was no need to repeat the request – Buvat set off at a trot, gained the Place des Victoires, the Rue du Mail, the Rue Montmartre, and at last arrived at his own house, No. 4, Rue du Temps-Perdu, where, nevertheless, he did not think himself safe till he had shut the door and bolted it behind him.

There he stopped an instant to breathe and to light his candle – then ascended the stairs, but he felt in his legs the effect of the occurrence, for he trembled so that he could hardly get to the top.

As to Bathilde, she had remained alone, getting more and more uneasy as the evening advanced. Up to seven o'clock she had seen a light in her neighbor's room, but at that time the lamp had been extinguished, and had not been relighted. Then Bathilde's time became divided between two occupations – one of which consisted in standing at her window to see if her neighbor did not return; the other in kneeling before the crucifix, where she said her evening prayers. She heard nine, ten, eleven, and half-past eleven, strike successively. She had heard all the noises in the streets die away one by one, and sink gradually into that vague and heavy sound which seems the breathing of a sleeping town; and all this without bringing her the slightest inkling as to whether he who had called himself her brother had sunk under the danger which hung over his head, or come triumphant through the crisis.

She was then in her own room, without light, so that no one might see that she was watching, and kneeling before her crucifix for the tenth time, when the door opened, and, by the light of his candle she saw Buvat so pale and haggard that she knew in an instant that something must have happened to him, and she rose, in spite of the uneasiness she felt for another, and darted toward him, asking what was the matter. But it was no easy thing to make Buvat speak, in the state he then was; the shock had reached his mind, and his tongue stammered as much as his legs trembled.

Still, when Buvat was seated in his easy chair, and had wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, when he had made two or three journeys to the door to see that his terrible hosts of the Rue des Bons Enfants had not followed him home, he began to stutter out his adventure. He told how he had been stopped in the Rue des Bons Enfants by a band of robbers, whose lieutenant, a ferocious-looking man nearly six feet high, had wanted to kill him, when the captain had come and saved his life. Bathilde listened with rapt attention, first, because she loved her guardian sincerely, and that his condition showed that – right or wrong – he had been greatly terrified; next, because nothing that happened that night seemed indifferent to her; and, strange as the idea was, it seemed to her that the handsome young man was not wholly unconnected with the scene in which Buvat had just played a part. She asked him if he had time to observe the face of the young man who had come to his aid, and saved his life.

Buvat answered that he had seen him face to face, as he saw her at that moment, and that the proof was that he was a handsome young man of from five to six and twenty, in a large felt hat, and wrapped in a cloak; moreover, in the movement which he had made in stretching out his hand to protect him, the cloak had opened, and shown that, besides his sword, he carried a pair of pistols in his belt. These details were too precise to allow Buvat to be accused of dreaming. Preoccupied as Bathilde was with the danger which the chevalier ran, she was none the less touched by that, smaller no doubt, but still real, which Buvat had just escaped; and as repose is the best remedy for all shocks, physical or moral, after offering him the glass of wine and sugar which he allowed himself on great occasions, and which nevertheless he refused on this one, she reminded him of his bed, where he ought to have been two hours before.

The shock had been violent enough to deprive Buvat of all wish for sleep, and even to convince him that he should sleep badly that night; but he reflected that in sitting up he should force Bathilde to sit up, and should see her in the morning with red eyes and pale cheeks, and, with his usual sacrifice of self, he told Bathilde that she was right – that he felt that sleep would do him good – lit his candle – kissed her forehead – and went up to his own room; not without stopping two or three times on the staircase to hear if there was any noise.

Left alone, Bathilde listened to the steps of Buvat, who went up into his own room; then she heard the creaking of his door, which he double locked; then, almost as trembling as Buvat himself, she ran to the window, forgetting even to pray.

She remained thus for nearly an hour, but without having kept any measure of time. Then she gave a cry of joy, for through the window, which no curtain now obscured, she saw her neighbor's door open, and D'Harmental enter with a candle in his hand.

By a miracle of foresight Bathilde had been right – the man in the felt hat and the cloak, who had protected Buvat, was really the young stranger, for the stranger had on a felt hat and a cloak; and moreover, hardly had he returned and shut the door, with almost as much care as Buvat had his, and thrown his cloak on a chair, than she saw that he had a tight coat of a dark color, and in his belt a sword and pistols. There was no longer any doubt: it was from head to foot the description given by Buvat. Bathilde was the more able to assure herself of this, that D'Harmental, without taking off any of his attire, took two or three turns in his room, his arms crossed, and thinking deeply; then he took his pistols from his belt, assured himself that they were primed, and placed them on the table near his bed, unclasped his sword, took it half out of the scabbard, replaced it, and put it under his pillow; then, shaking his head, as if to shake out the somber ideas that annoyed him, he approached the window, opened it, and gazed earnestly at that of the young girl, who, forgetting that she could not be seen, stepped back, and let the curtain fall before her, as if the darkness which surrounded her were not a sufficient screen.

She remained thus motionless and silent, her hand on her heart, as if to still its beatings; then she quietly raised the curtain, but that of her neighbor was down, and she saw nothing but his shadow passing and repassing before it.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE CONSUL DUILIUS

The morning following the day, or rather the night, on which the events we have just related had occurred, the Duc d'Orleans, who had returned to the Palais Royal without accident, after having slept all night as usual, passed into his study at his accustomed hour – that is to say, about eleven o'clock. Thanks to the sang-froid with which nature had blessed him, and which he owed chiefly to his great courage, to his disdain for danger, and his carelessness of death, not only was it impossible to observe in him any change from his ordinary calm, which ennui only turned to gloom, but he had most probably already forgotten the strange event of which he had so nearly been the victim.

The study into which he had just entered was remarkable as belonging to a man at once a savant, a politician, and an artist. Thus a large table covered with a green cloth, and loaded with papers, inkstand, and pens, occupied the middle of the room; but all round, on desks, on easels, on stands, were an opera commenced, a half-finished drawing, a chemical retort, etc. The regent, with a strange versatility of mind, passed in an instant from the deepest problems of politics to the most capricious fancies of painting, and from the most delicate calculations of chemistry to the somber or joyous inspirations of music. The regent feared nothing but ennui, that enemy against whom he struggled unceasingly, without ever quite succeeding in conquering it, and which, repulsed by work, study, or pleasure, yet remained in sight – if one may say so – like one of those clouds on the horizon, toward which, even in the finest days, the pilot involuntarily turns his eyes. The regent was never unoccupied, and had the most opposite amusements always at hand.

On entering his study, where the council were to meet in two hours, he went toward an unfinished drawing, representing a scene from "Daphnis and Chloe," and returned to the work, interrupted two days before by that famous game of tennis, which had commenced by a racket blow, and finished by the supper at Madame de Sabran's.

A messenger came to tell him that Madame Elizabeth Charlotte, his mother, had asked twice if he were up. The regent, who had the most profound respect for the princess palatine, sent word that not only was he visible, but that if madame were ready to receive him, he would pay her a visit directly. He then returned to his work with all the eagerness of an artist. Shortly after the door opened, and his mother herself appeared.Madame, the wife of Philippe, the first brother of the king, came to France after the strange and unexpected death of Madame Henriette of England, to take the place of that beautiful and gracious princess, who had passed from the scene like a dream. This comparison, difficult to sustain for any new-comer, was doubly so to the poor German princess, who, if we may believe her own portrait, with her little eyes, her short and thick nose, her long thin lips, her hanging cheeks and her large face, was far from being pretty. Unfortunately, the faults of her face were not compensated for by beauty of figure. She was little and fat, with a short body and legs, and such frightful hands that she avows herself that there were none uglier to be found in the world, and that it was the only thing about her to which Louis XIV. could never become accustomed. But Louis XIV. had chosen her, not to increase the beauties of his court, but to extend his influence beyond the Rhine.By the marriage of his brother with the princess palatine, Louis XIV., who had already acquired some chance of inheritance in Spain, by marrying Maria Theresa, and by Philippe the First's marriage with the Princess Henriette, only sister of Charles II., would acquire new rights over Bavaria, and probably in the Palatinate. He calculated, and calculated rightly, that her brother, who was delicate, would probably die young, and without children.

Madame, the wife of Philippe, the first brother of the king, came to France after the strange and unexpected death of Madame Henriette of England, to take the place of that beautiful and gracious princess, who had passed from the scene like a dream. This comparison, difficult to sustain for any new-comer, was doubly so to the poor German princess, who, if we may believe her own portrait, with her little eyes, her short and thick nose, her long thin lips, her hanging cheeks and her large face, was far from being pretty. Unfortunately, the faults of her face were not compensated for by beauty of figure. She was little and fat, with a short body and legs, and such frightful hands that she avows herself that there were none uglier to be found in the world, and that it was the only thing about her to which Louis XIV. could never become accustomed. But Louis XIV. had chosen her, not to increase the beauties of his court, but to extend his influence beyond the Rhine.

By the marriage of his brother with the princess palatine, Louis XIV., who had already acquired some chance of inheritance in Spain, by marrying Maria Theresa, and by Philippe the First's marriage with the Princess Henriette, only sister of Charles II., would acquire new rights over Bavaria, and probably in the Palatinate. He calculated, and calculated rightly, that her brother, who was delicate, would probably die young, and without children.

Madame, instead of being treated at her husband's death according to her marriage contract, and forced to retire into a convent, or into the old castle of Montargis, was, in spite of Madame de Maintenon's hatred, maintained by Louis XIV. in all the titles and honors which she enjoyed during her husband's lifetime, although the king had not forgotten the blow which she gave to the young Duc de Chartres at Versailles, when he announced his marriage with Mademoiselle de Blois. The proud princess, with her thirty-two quarterings, thought it a humiliation that her son should marry a woman whom the royal legitimation could not prevent from being the fruit of a double adultery, and at the first moment, unable to command her feelings, she revenged herself by this maternal correction, rather exaggerated, when a young man of eighteen was the object, for the affront offered to the honor of her ancestors.

As the young Duc de Chartres had himself only consented unwillingly to this marriage, he easily understood his mother's dislike to it, though he would have preferred, doubtless, that she should have shown it in a rather less Teutonic manner. The result was, that when Monsieur died, and the Duc de Chartres became Duc d'Orleans, his mother, who might have feared that the blow at Versailles had left some disagreeable reminiscence in the mind of the new master of the Palais Royal, found, on the contrary, a more respectful son than ever. This respect increased, and as regent he gave his mother a position equal to that of his wife. When Madame de Berry, his much-loved daughter, asked her father for a company of guards, he granted it, but ordered at the same time that a similar company should be given to his mother.

Madame held thus a high position, and if, in spite of that position, she had no political influence, the reason was that the regent made it a principle of action never to allow women to meddle with state affairs. It may be also, that Philippe the Second, regent of France, was more reserved toward his mother than toward his mistresses, for he knew her epistolary inclinations, and he had no fancy for seeing his projects made the subjects of the daily correspondence which she kept up with the Princess Wilhelmina Charlotte, and the Duke Anthony Ulric of Brunswick. In exchange for this loss, he left her the management of the house and of his daughters, which, from her overpowering idleness, the Duchesse d'Orleans abandoned willingly to her mother-in-law. In this last particular, however, the poor palatine (if one may believe the memoirs written at the time) was not happy. Madame de Berry lived publicly with Riom, and Mademoiselle de Valois was secretly the mistress of Richelieu, who, without anybody knowing how, and as if he had the enchanted ring of Gyges, appeared to get into her rooms, in spite of the guards who watched the doors, in spite of the spies with whom the regent surrounded him, and though, more than once, he had hidden himself in his daughter's room to watch.

As to Mademoiselle de Chartres, whose character had as yet seemed much more masculine than feminine, she, in making a man of herself, as one may say, seemed to forget that other men existed, when, some days before the time at which we have arrived, being at the opera, and hearing her music master, Cauchereau, the finished and expressive singer of the Academic Royal, who, in a love scene, was prolonging a note full of the most exquisite grace and feeling, the young princess, carried away by artistic enthusiasm, stretched out her arms and cried aloud – "Ah! my dear Cauchereau!" This unexpected exclamation had troubled her mother, who had sent away the beautiful tenor, and, putting aside her habitual apathy, determined to watch over her daughter herself. There remained the Princess Louise, who was afterward Queen of Spain, and Mademoiselle Elizabeth, who became the Duchesse de Lorraine, but as to them there was nothing said; either they were really wise, or else they understood better than their elders how to restrain the sentiments of their hearts, or the accents of passion. As soon as the prince saw his mother appear, he thought something new was wrong in the rebellious troop of which she had taken the command, and which gave her such trouble; but, as nothing could make him forget the respect which, in public and in private, he paid to his mother, he rose on seeing her, and after having bowed, and taking her hand to lead her to a seat, he remained standing himself.