The Countess of Charny; or, The Execution of King Louis XVI

It is not possible to give an idea of the devastation in the Tuileries.

Blood poured out of the rooms and spouted like cascades down the stairs. In some of the chambers the bodies yet lay.

Like the other searchers, Andrea took a torch and looked at body after body. Thus she made her way to the royal rooms. Pitou still followed her.

Here, as in the other rooms, she sought in vain; she paused, undecided whither to turn. Seeing her embarrassment, the soldier went up to her.

"Alas, I suspect what your ladyship is seeking!" he said.

"Captain Pitou?" Andrea exclaimed.

"At your service."

"Yes, yes, I have great need of you," she said. Going to him, she took both his hands, and continued: "Do you know what has become of the Count of Charny?"

"I do not, my lady; but I can help you to look for him."

"There is one person who can tell us whether he is dead or alive, and where he is in either case," observed Andrea.

"Who is that, my lady?" queried the peasant.

"The queen," muttered Andrea.

"Do you know where she is?" inquired Pitou.

"I believe she is in the House, and I have still the hope that my Lord Charny is with her."

"Why, yes, yes," said Pitou, snatching at the hope for the mourner's sake; "would you like to go into the House?"

"But they may refuse me admission."

"I'll undertake to get the doors to open."

"Come, then."

Andrea flung the flambeau from her at the risk of setting fire to the place, for what mattered the Tuileries to her in such desperation? so deep that she could not find tears.

From having lived in the palace as the queen's attendant, she knew all the ways, and she led them back by short cuts to the grand entrance where Maniquet was on the lookout.

"How is your countess getting on?" he inquired.

"She hopes to find her lord in the House, where we are going. As we may find him," he added, in a low voice, "but dead, send me four stout lads to the Feuillants' gate, whom I may rely on to defend the body of an aristocrat as well as though a good patriot's."

"All right; go ahead with your countess; I will send the men."

Andrea was waiting at the garden end, where a sentry was posted; but as that was done by Pitou, he naturally let his captain pass.

The palace gardens were lighted by lamps set mostly on the statue pedestals. As it was almost as warm as in the heat of the day, and the slight breeze barely ruffled the leaves, the lamp-flames rose straight, like spear-heads, and lighted up the corpses strewn under the trees.

But Andrea felt so convinced that she should find her husband where the queen had taken refuge, that she walked on, without looking to either right or left. Thus they reached the Feuillants' gate.

The royal family had been gone an hour, and were in the record office, for the time. To reach them, there were two obstacles to pass: the guards and the royal attendants.

Pitou, as commanding the Tuileries, had the password, and could therefore conduct the lady up to the line of gentlemen.

The former favorite of the queen had but to use her name to take the next step.

On entering the little room reserved for her, the queen had thrown herself on the bed, and bit the pillow amid sobs and tears.

Certainly, one who had lost a throne and liberty, and perhaps would lose her life, had lost enough for no one to chaffer about the degree of her despair, and not to seek behind her deep abasement if some keener sorrow still did not draw these tears from her eyes and sobs from her bosom.

Owing to the respect inspired by this supreme grief, she had been left alone at the first.

She heard the room door open, but as it might be that from the king's, she did not turn; though she heard steps approaching her pillow, she did not lift her head from it.

But suddenly she sprung up, as though a serpent had stung her.

A well-known voice had simply uttered the single word, "Madame."

"Andrea?" cried Marie Antoinette, rising on her elbow. "What do you want?"

"I want the answer God demanded of Cain when He said, 'What have you done with your brother'?"

"With this difference," returned the queen, "That Cain had killed his brother; whereas I – so gladly – would give not only my existence, but ten lives, to save his dear one."

Andrea staggered; a cold sweat burst out on her forehead, and her teeth chattered.

"Then he was killed?" she faltered, making a great effort.

"Do you think I am wailing for my crown?" demanded the fallen majesty, looking hard at her. "Do you believe that if this blood were mine" – here she showed her dyed foot – "I should not have washed it off?"

Andrea became lividly pale.

"Then you know where his body is?" she said.

"I could take you to it, if I were allowed to go forth," said the prisoner.

Andrea went out at the door by which Pitou was waiting.

"Captain," she said, "one of my friends, a lady of the queen's, offers to take me where the count's body is. May she go out with me?"

"On condition that you bring her back whence she came," said the officer.

"That will do."

"Comrade," said Pitou to his sentry, "one of the queen's women wants to go out to help us find the body of a brave officer of whom this lady is the widow. I will answer for her with my head."

"That is good enough for me, captain," was the reply.

The anteroom door opened and the queen appeared, but she had a veil wound round her head. They went down the stairs, the queen leading.

After a twenty-seven hours' session, the House had adjourned, and the immense hall, where so much noise and so many events had been compressed, was dumb, void, and somber as a sepulcher.

The queen called for a light. Pitou picked up an extinguished link, lighted it at a lantern, and handed it to her, and she resumed the march. As they passed the entrance door, the queen pointed to it.

"He was killed there," she said.

Andrea did not reply; she seemed a specter haunting one who had called her up.

The queen lowered the torch to the floor in the lobby, saying: "Behold his blood."

Andrea remained mute.

The conductress went straight to a closet attached to the "Logographe" box, pulled the door open, and said, as she held up the light to illumine the interior:

"Here is his body."

Andrea entered the room, knelt down, and taking the head upon her knee, she said:

"Madame, I thank you; this is all I wanted of you."

"But I have something to ask you – won't you forgive me?"

There fell a short silence, as though Andrea were reflecting.

"Yes," she replied, at length, "for I shall be with him on the morrow."

The queen drew a pair of scissors from her bosom, where they were hidden like a weapon to be used in an extremity.

"Then would you kindly – " She spoke almost supplicatingly, as she held out the joined blades to the mourner.

Andrea cut a lock of hair from the corpse's brow, and handed it and the instrument to the other. She caught her hand and kissed it, but Andrea snatched away hers, as though the lips of her royal mistress had scorched her.

"Ah!" muttered the queen, throwing a last glance on the remains, "who can tell which of us loved him the most?"

"Oh, my darling George," retorted Andrea, in the same low tone, "I trust that you at least know now that I loved you the best!"

The queen went back on the way to her prison, leaving Andrea with the remains of her husband, on which a pale moonbeam fell through a small grated window, like the gaze of a friend.

Without knowing who she was, Pitou conducted Marie Antoinette, and saw her safely lodged. Relieved of his responsibility toward the soldier on guard, he went out on the terrace to see if the squad he had asked of Maniquet had arrived. The four were waiting.

"Come in," said Pitou.

Using the torch which he had taken from the queen's hands, he led his men to the room where Andrea was still gazing on her husband's white but still handsome face in the moonshine. The torch-light made her look up.

"What do you want?" she challenged of the Guards, as though she thought they came to rob her of the dead.

"My lady," said Pitou, "we come to carry the body of Count Charny to his house in Coq-Heron Street."

"Will you swear to me that it is purely for that?" Andrea asked.

Pitou held out his hand over the dead body with a dignity of which he might be believed incapable.

"Then I owe you apology, and I will pray God," said Andrea, "in my last moments, to spare you and yours such woe as He hath afflicted me with."

The four men took up the warrior on their muskets, and Pitou, with his drawn sword, placed himself at the head of the funeral party. Andrea walked beside the corpse, holding the cold and rigid hand in her own. They put the body on the countess's bed, when that lady said to the National Guardsmen:

"Receive the blessings of one who will pray to God for you to-morrow before Him. Captain Pitou," she added, "I owe you more than I ever can repay you. May I rely on you for a final service?"

"Order me, madame."

"Arrange that Doctor Gilbert shall be here at eight o'clock in the morning."

Pitou bowed and went out. Turning his head as he did so, he saw Andrea kneel at the bed as at an altar.

CHAPTER XVII.

WHAT ANDREA WANTED OF GILBERT

At eight precisely next day, Gilbert knocked at the house-door of the Countess of Charny.

On hearing of her request made to Pitou, he had asked him for full particulars of the occurrence, and he had pondered over them.

As he went out in the morning, he sent for Pitou to go to the college where his son and Andrea's, Sebastian, was being educated, and bring him to Coq-Heron Street. He was to wait at the door there for the physician to come out.

No doubt the old janitor had been informed of the doctor's visit, for he showed him at once into the sitting-room.

Andrea was waiting, clad in full mourning. It was clear that she had neither slept nor wept all the night through; her face was pale and her eyes dry. Never had the lines of her countenance, always indicative of willfulness carried to the degree of stubbornness, been more firmly fixed.

It was hard to tell what resolution that loving heart had settled on, but it was plain that it had come to one. This was comprehended by Gilbert at a first glance, as he was a skilled observer and a reasoning physician.

He bowed and waited.

"I asked you to come because I want a favor done, and it must be put to one who can not refuse it me."

"You are right, madame; not, perhaps, in what you are about to ask, but in what you have done; for you have the right to claim of me anything, even to my life."

She smiled bitterly.

"Your life, sir, is one of those so precious to mankind that I should be the first to pray God to prolong it and make it happy, far from wishing it abridged. But acknowledge that yours is placed under happy influences, as there are others seemingly doomed beneath a fatal star."

Gilbert was silent.

"Mine, for instance," went on Andrea; "what do you say about mine? Let me recall it briefly," she said, as Gilbert lowered his eyes. "I was born poor. My father was a ruined spendthrift before I was born. My childhood was sad and lonesome. You knew what my father was, as you were born on his estate and grew up in our house, and you can measure the little affection he had for me.

"Two persons, one of whom was bound to be a stranger to me, while the other was unknown, exercised a fatal and mysterious sway over me, in which my will went for naught. One disposed of my soul, the other of my body. I became a mother without ceasing to be a virgin. By this horrid event I nearly lost the love of the only being who ever loved me – my brother Philip.

"I took refuge in the idea of motherhood, and that my babe would love me; but it was snatched from me within an hour of its birth. I was therefore a wife without a husband, a mother without a child.

"A queen's friendship consoled me.

"One day chance sent me in a public vehicle with the queen and a handsome young gallant, whom fatality caused me to love, though I had never loved a soul.

"He fell in love with the queen. I became the confidante in this amour. As I believe you have loved without return, Doctor Gilbert, you can understand what I suffered. Yet this was not enough. It happened on a day that the queen came to me to say: 'Andrea, save my life; more than life – my honor!' It was necessary that I should become the bride of the man I had loved three years without becoming his wife. I agreed. Five years I dwelt beside that man, flame within, but ice without; a statue with a burning heart. Doctor, as a doctor, can you understand what my heart went through?

"One day – day of unspeakable bliss – my self-sacrifice, silence, and devotion touched that man. For six years I loved him without letting him suspect it by a look, when he came all of a quiver to throw himself at my feet and cry: 'I know all, and I love you!'

"Willing to recompense me, God, in giving me my husband, restored me my child. A year flew by like a day – nay, an hour, a minute. This year is all I call my life.

"Four days ago the lightning fell at my feet. The count's honor bid him go to Paris, to die there. I did not make any remark, did not shed a tear; I went with him. Hardly had we arrived before he parted from me. Last night I found him, slain. There he rests, in the next room.

"Do you think I am too ambitious to crave to lie in the same grave? Do you believe you can refuse the request I make to you?

"Doctor Gilbert, you are a learned physician and a skillful chemist. You have been guilty of great wrongs to me, and you have much to expiate as regards me. Well, give me a swift sure poison, and I shall not merely forgive you all, but die with a heart full of gratitude to you."

"Madame," replied Gilbert, "as you say, your life has been one long, dolorous trial, and for it all glory be yours, since you have borne it nobly and saintly, like a martyr."

She gave an impatient toss of the head, as if she wanted a direct answer.

"Now you say to your torturer: 'You made my life a misery; give me a sweet death.' You have the right to do this, and there is reason in your adding: 'You must do it, for you have no right to refuse me anything,' Do you still want the poison?"

"I entreat you to be friend enough to give it me."

"Is life so heavy to you that it is impossible for you to support it?"

"Death is the sweetest boon man can give me; the greatest blessing God may grant me."

"In ten minutes you shall have your wish, madame," responded Gilbert, bowing and taking a step toward the door.

"Ah!" said the lady, holding out her hand to him, "you do me more kindness in an instant than you did harm in all your life. God bless you, Gilbert!"

He hurried out. At the door he found Pitou and Sebastian, waiting in a hack.

"Sebastian," he said to the youth, drawing a small vial attached to a gold chain from inside his clothes at his breast, "take this flask of liquor to the Countess of Charny."

"How long am I to stay with her?"

"As long as you like."

"Where am I to find you?"

"I shall be waiting here."

Taking the small bottle, the young man went in-doors. In a quarter of an hour he came forth. Gilbert cast on him a rapid glance. He brought back the tiny flask untouched.

"What did she say?" asked Gilbert.

"'Not from your hand, my child!'"

"What did she do then?"

"She fell a-weeping."

"She is saved," said Gilbert. "Come, my boy," and he embraced him more tenderly than ever before. In clasping him to his heart, he heard the crackling of paper.

"What is that?" he asked, with a nervous laugh of joy. "Do you by chance carry your compositions in your breast-pocket?"

"There, I had forgotten," said the youth, taking a parchment from his pocket. "The countess gave it me, and says it is to be deposited in the proper registry."

The doctor examined the paper. It was a document which empowered, in default of heirs male, to the titles of Philip de Taverney, Knight of Redcastle, Sebastian Emile Gilbert, son of Andrea Taverney, Countess of Charny, to wear that title honorarily until the king should make it good to him by favor of his mother's service to the Crown, and perhaps award him the estates to maintain the dignity.

"Keep it," said Gilbert, with a melancholy smile; "as well date it from the Greek kalends! The king, I fear, will nevermore dispose of more than six-feet-by-three of landed property in his once kingdom of France."

Gilbert could jest, for he believed Andrea saved.

He had reckoned without Marat. A week after, he learned that the scoundrel had denounced the favorite of the queen, and that the widowed Countess of Charny had been arrested and lodged in the old Abbey Prison.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE ASSEMBLY AND THE COMMUNE

It was the Commune which had caused the attack on the palace, which the king must have seen, for he took refuge in the House, and not in the City Hall. The Commune wanted to smother the wolf – the she-wolf and the whelps – between two blankets in their den.

This shelter to the royals converted the Assembly into Royalists. It was asserted that the Luxembourg Palace, assigned to the king as a residence, had a secret communication with those catacombs which burrow under Paris, so that he might get away at any hour.

The Assembly did not want to quarrel with the Commune over such a trifle, and allowed it to choose the royal house of detention.

The city pitched on the temple. It was not a palace, but a prison, under the town's hand; an old, lonely tower, strong, heavy, lugubrious. In it Philip the Fair broke up the Middle Ages revolting against him, and was royalty to be broken down in it now?

All the houses in the neighborhood were illuminated as the royal captives were taken hither to the part called "the palace," from Count Artois making it his city residence. They were happy to hold in bondage the king no more, but the friend of the foreign foe, the great enemy of the Revolution, and the ally of the nobles and the clergy.

The royal servants looked at the lodgings with stupefaction. In their tearful eyes were still the splendors of the kingly dwellings, while this was not even a prison into which was flung their master, but a kennel! Misfortune was not to have any majesty.

But, through strength of mind or dullness, the king remained unaffected, and slept on the poverty-stricken bed as tranquilly as in his palace, perhaps more so.

At this time, the king would have been the happiest man in the world had he been given a country cottage with ten acres, a forge, a chapel and a chaplain, and a library of travel-books, with his wife and children. But it was altogether different with the queen.

The proud lioness did not rage at the sight of her cage, but that was because so sharp a sorrow ached in her heart that she was blind and insensible to all around her.

The men who had done the fighting in the capture of the Royalist stronghold were willing that the prisoners, Swiss and gentlemen, should be tried by court-martial. But Marat shrieked for massacre, as making shorter work than even a drum-head court.

Danton yielded to him. Before the snake the lion was cowed, and slunk away, trying to act the fox.

The city wards pressed the Assembly to create an extraordinary tribunal. It was established on the twentieth, and condemned a Royalist to death. The execution took place by torch-light, with such horrible effect, that the executioner, in the act of holding up the lopped-off head to the mob, yelled and fell dead off upon the pavement.

The Revolution of 1789, with Necker, Bailly, and Sieyes, ended in 1790; that of Barnave, Lafayette, and Mirabeau in 1792, while the Red Revolution, the bloody one of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre, was commencing.

Lafayette, repulsed instinctively by the army, which he had called upon in an address to march on Paris and restore the king, had fled abroad.

Meanwhile, the Austrians, whom the queen had prayed to see in the moonlight from her palace windows, had captured Longwy. The other extremity of France, La Vendee, had risen on the eve of this surrender.

To meet this condition of affairs, the Assembly assigned Dumouriez to the command of the Army of the East; ordered the arrest of Lafayette; decreed the razing of Longwy when it should be retaken; banished all priests who would not take the oath of allegiance; authorized house-to-house visits for aristocrats and weapons, and sold all the property of fugitives.

The Commune, with Marat as its prophet, set up the guillotine on Carrousel Square, with an apology that it could only send one victim a day, owing to the trouble of obtaining convictions.

On the 28th of August, the Assembly passed the law on domiciliary visits. The rumor spread that the Austrian and Prussian armies had effected their junction, and that Longwy had fallen.

It followed that the enemy, so long prayed for by the king, the nobles, and the priests, was marching upon Paris, and might be here in six stages, if nothing stopped him.

What would happen then to this boiling crater from which the shocks had made the Old World quake the last three years?

The insolent jest of Bouille would be realized, that not one stone would be left upon another.

It was considered a sure thing that a general, terrible, and inexorable doom was to fall on the Parisians after their city was destroyed. A letter found in the Tuileries had said:

"In the rear of the army will travel the courts, informed on the journey by the fugitives of the misdeeds and their authors, so that no time will be lost in trying the Jacobins in the Prussian king's camp, and getting their halters ready."

The stories also came of the Uhlans seizing Republican local worthies and cropping their ears. If they acted thus on the threshold, what would they do when within the gates?

It was no longer a secret.

A great throne would be erected before the heap of ruins which was Paris. All the population would be dragged and beaten into passing before it; the good and the bad would be sifted apart as on the last judgment day. The good – in other words, the religious and the Royalists – would pass to the right, and France would be turned over to them for them to work their pleasure; the bad, the rebels, would be sent to the left, where would be waiting the guillotine, invented by the Revolution, which would perish by it.

But to face the foreign invader, had this poor people any self-support? Those whom they had worshiped, enriched, and paid to defend her, would they stand up for her now? No.

The king conspired with the enemy, and from the temple, where he was confined, continued to correspond with the Prussians and Austrians: the nobility marched against France, and were formed in battle array by her princes; her priests made the peasants revolt. From their prison cells, the Royalist prisoners cheered over the defeats of the French by the Prussians, and the Prussians at Longwy were hailed by the captives in the abbey and the temple.

In consequence, Danton, the man for extremes, rushed into the rostrum.

"When the country is in danger, everything belongs to the country," he said.

All the dwellings were searched, and three thousand persons arrested; two thousand guns were taken.

Terror was needed; they obtained it. The worst mischief from the search was one not foreseen; the mob had entered rich houses, and the sight of luxuries had redoubled their hatred, though not inciting them to pillage. There was so little robbery that Beaumarchais, then in jail, said that the crowd nearly drowned a woman who plucked a rose in his gardens.

On this general search day, the Commune summoned before its bar a Girondist editor, Girey-Dupre, who took refuge at the War Ministry, from not having time to get to the House. Insulted by one of its members, the Girondists summoned the Commune's president, Huguenin, before its bar for having allowed the Ministry to take Girey by force.

Huguenin would not come, and he was ordered to be arrested by main force, while a fresh election for a Commune was decreed.

The present one determined to hold office, and thus was civil war set going. No longer the mob against the king, citizens against aristocrats, the cottage against the castle; but hovels against houses, ward against ward, pike to pike, and mob to mob.