The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty

Charny bowed at this suggestion of his permission being sought, like a man who was obeying an order, far more than granting a request.

“As this is a fixed resolve,” he said, marking how steady she was with all her meekness, “am I to be allowed to call on you here?”

She fastened her eyes on him, usually clear but now full of astonishment and blandness.

“Of course, my lord,” was her response, “and as I shall have no company, you can come any time that your duties at the palace allow you to set aside a little while to me.”

Never had Charny seen so much charm in her gaze, or such tenderness in her voice. Something ran through his veins, like the shudder from a lover’s first kiss. He glanced at the place whence he had risen when Andrea got up; he would have given a year of life to take his seat there again if she would not once more repel him. But the soldier was timid, and he dared not allow himself the liberty.

On her part, Andrea would have given ten years, sooner than only one, to have him in that place, but, unfortunately, each was ignorant of the other’s mood, and they stood still, in almost painful expectation.

“You were saying that you had to endure a great deal at court. Was not the Queen pleasant towards you?”

“I have nothing to blame her Majesty for,” replied the ex-lady of honor, “and I should be unjust if I did not acknowledge her Majesty’s kind treatment.”

“I hinted at this, because I have lately noticed that the friendship seemed to show a falling off,” continued the count.

“That is possible, and that is why I am leaving the court.”

“But you will live so lonely?”

“Have I not always lived so, my lord?” sighed Andrea, “as maid – wife – “ she stopped, seeing that she was going too far.

“Do you make me a reproach?”

“What right have I in heaven’s name to make reproaches to your lordship?” retorted the countess: “do you believe I have forgot the circumstances under which we were plighted? Just the opposite of those who vow before the altar reciprocal love and mutual protection, we swore eternal indifference and complete separation. The blame would be to the one who forgot that oath.”

Charny caught the sigh which these words had not entirely suppressed, from the speaker’s heart.

“But this is such a small dwelling,” he said: “a countess in one sitting room with only another to eat in, and this for repose – “

She sprang in between him and the bedroom, seeing Sebastian behind the door, in her mind’s eye.

“Oh, my lord, do not go that way, I entreat you,” she exclaimed, barring the passage with her extended arms.

“Oh, my lady,” said he, looking at her so pale and trembling, with fright never more plain on a human face, “I knew that you did not like me: but I had no idea you hated me to this degree.”

Incapable of remaining any longer beside his wife without an outburst, he reeled for a space like an intoxicated man; recovering himself, he rushed out of the room with an exclamation of pain which echoed in the depths of the hearer’s heart.

She watched him till he was out of sight; she listened till she could no longer hear his departing carriage, and then with a breaking heart, dreading that she had not enough motherly love to combat with this other passion, she darted into the bedroom, calling out:

“Sebastian,” but no voice replied.

By the trembling of the night-lamp in a draft she perceived that the window was open. It was the same by which the child was kidnapped fifteen years before.

“This is justice,” she muttered; “did he not say that I was no more his mother?”

Comprehending that she had lost both husband and child at the period when she had recovered them, Andrea threw herself on the couch, at the end of her resignation and her prayers exhausted.

Suddenly it seemed to her that something more dreadful than her sorrowful plight glided in between grief and her tears.

She looked up and beheld a man, after climbing in at the open window, standing on the floor.

She wished to shriek and ring for help; but he bent on her the fascinating gaze which caused her the invincible lethargy she remembered Cagliostro could impose upon her: but in this mesmerist and his spell-binding look and bearing, she recognized Gilbert.

How was it the execrated father stood in the stead of his beloved son?

CHAPTER XIV

IN SEARCH OF THEIR SON

IT was Dr. Gilbert who was closeted with the King when the usher inquired after him on the order of Isidore and the entreaty of Sebastian.

The upright heart of Louis XVI. had appreciated the loyalty in the doctor’s. After half an hour, the latter came forth and went into the Queen’s ante-chamber, where he saw Isidore.

“I asked for you, doctor, but I have another with me who wants still more to see you. It will be cruel to detain you from him: so let us hasten to the Green Saloon.”

But the room was empty and such was the confusion in the palace that no servant was at hand to inform them what had become of the young man.

“It was a person I met on the road, eager to get to Paris and coming here on foot only for my giving him a ride.”

“Are you speaking of the peasant Pitou?”

“No, doctor – of your son, Sebastian.”

At this, the usher who had taken Isidore away returned.

He was ignorant of what had happened but, luckily, a second footman had seen the singular disappearance of the boy in the carriage of a court lady.

They hastened to the gates where the janitor well recalled that the direction to the coachman was “No. 9 Coq-Heron Street, first carriage entrance from Plastriere Street.”

“My sister-in-law’s,” exclaimed Isidore, “the countess of Charny!”

“Fatality,” muttered Gilbert. “He must have recognized her,” he said in a lower tone.

“Let us go there,” suggested the young noble.

Gilbert saw all the dangers of Andrea’s son being discovered by her husband.

“My lord,” he said, “my son is in safety in the hands of the Countess of Charny, and as I have the honor to know her, I think I can call by myself. Besides it is more proper that you should be on your road; for I presume you are going to Turin, from what I heard in the King’s presence.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“Receive my thanks for your kindness to Sebastian, and be off! When a father says he is not uneasy, you need feel no anxiety.”

Isidore held out his hand which the revolutionist shook with more heartiness than he had for most of his class; while the nobleman returned within the palace, he went along to the junction of the streets Coq-Heron and Plastriere.

Both were painful memories.

In the latter he had lived, a poor boy, earning his bread by copying music, by receiving instruction from the author Rousseau. From his window he had contemplated Andrea at her own casement, under the hands of her maid, Nicole, his first sweetheart, and to that window he had made his way by a rope and by scaling the wall, to view more closely and satisfy his passion for the high-born lady who had bewitched him.

Rousseau was dead, but Andrea was rich and nobler still; he had also attained wealth and consideration.

But was he any happier than when he walked out of doors to dip his crust in the waters of this public fountain?

He could not help walking up to the door where Rousseau had lived. It was open on the alley which ran under the building to the yard at the back as well as up to the attic where he was lodged.

He went up to the first floor back, where the window on the landing gave a view of the rear house where Baron Taverney had dwelt.

No one disturbed him in his contemplation; the house had come down in the world; no janitor; the inhabitants were poor folk who did not fear thieves.

The garden at Taverney’s house was the same as a dozen years before. The vine still hung on the trellis which had served him as ladder in his night clamberings within the enclosure.

He was unaware whether Count Charny was with his wife, but he was so bent on learning about Sebastian that he meant to risk all.

He climbed the wall and descended on the other side. In the garden nothing obstructed him, and thus he reached the window of Andrea’s Bedroom.

In another instant, as related, the two enemies stood face to face.

The lady’s first feeling was invincible repugnance rather than profound terror.

For her the Americanized Gilbert, the friend of Washington and Lafayette, aristocratic through study, science and genius, was still the hangdog Gilbert of her father’s manor house, and the gardener’s boy of Trianon Palace.

Gilbert no longer bore her the ardent love which had driven him to crime in his youth, but the deep and tender affection, spite of her insults and persecutions, of a man ready to do a service at risk of his life.

With the insight nature had given him and the justice education implanted, Gilbert had weighed himself: he understood that Andrea’s misfortunes arose from him, and he would never be quits with her until he had made her as happy as he had the reverse.

But how could he blissfully affect her future.

It was impossible for him yet to comprehend.

On seeing this but to so much despair, again the prey to woe, all his fibres of mercy were moved for so much misery.

Instead of using his hypnotic power to subdue her, he spoke softly to her, ready to master her if she became rebellious.

The result was that the medium felt the ethereal fluid fade away like a dissolving fog, by Gilbert’s permission, and she was able to speak of her own free will.

“What do you want, sir? how came you here?”

“By the way I used before,” replied the doctor. “Hence you can be easy – no one will know of it. Why? because I come to claim a treasure, of no consequence to you, but precious to me, my son. I want you to tell what has become of my son, taken away in your carriage and brought here.”

“How do I know? taught by you to hate his mother, he has fled.”

“His mother? are you really a mother to him?”

“Oh, you see my grief, you have heard my cries, and looking on my despair, you ask me if I am his mother?”

“How then are you ignorant what has become of him?”

“But I tell you he has fled; that I came into this room for him and found the window open and the room vacant.”

“Where could he have gone – good God!” exclaimed Gilbert. “It is past midnight and he does not know the town.”

“Do you believe anything evil has befallen him?” asked she, approaching.

“We shall hear, for it is you who shall tell me.”

And with a wave of the hand he began anew to plunge her into the mesmeric sleep.

She uttered a sigh and fell off into repose.

“Am I to put forth all my will power or will you answer voluntarily?” asked Gilbert when she was under control.

“Will you tell the boy again that I am not his mother?”

“That depends. Do you love him?”

“Ardently, with all my soul.”

“Then you are his mother as I am his father, for it is thus I love him. Loving him, you shall see him again. When did you part from the boy?”

“About half an hour ago, when Count Charny called. I had pushed him into this room.”

“What were his last words?”

“That I was no more his mother: because I had told him that you were a villain.”

“Look into the poor boy’s heart and see what harm you wrought.”

“Oh, God forgive me,” said Andrea: “forgive me, my son.”

“Did Count Charny suspect the boy was here?”

“No, I am sure.”

“Why did he not stay?”

“Because he never stays long with me. Oh, wretch that I am,” she interrupted herself, “he was returning to me after refusing that mission – because he loves me – he loves me!”

Gilbert began to see more clearly into this drama which his eye was first to penetrate.

“But do you love him?” he demanded.

“I see your intention is good: you wish to make up to me for the grief you have caused: but I refuse the boon coming from you. I hate you and wish to continue in my hatred.”

“Poor mortality,” muttered the philosopher, “have you had so much happiness that you can dally with a certain amount offered you? so you love him?”

“Yes. Since first I saw him, as the Queen and I sat with him in a hackney-carriage in which we returned from Paris to Versailles one night.”

“You know what love is, Andrea,” queried Gilbert, mournfully.

“I know that love has been given as a standard by which we can measure how much sadness we can endure,” replied she.

“It is well: you are a true woman and a true mother: a rough diamond, you were shaped by the stern lapidary known as Grief. Return to Sebastian.”

“Yes, I see him leaving the house with clenched hands and knit brow. He wanders up the street – he goes up to a woman and asks her for St. Honore Street – “

“My street: he was seeking for my house. Poor child! he will be there awaiting me.”

“Hold! he has gone astray – he is in New St. Roch Street. Oh, he does not see that vehicle coming down Sourdiere Street, but I see the horses – Ah!”

She drew herself up with an awful scream, maternal anguish depicted on her visage, down which rolled tears and perspiration.

“Oh, if harm befalls him, remember that it will recoil on your head,” hissed Gilbert.

“Ah,” sighed Andrea in relief, without hearing or heeding him, “God in heaven be praised! it is the horse’s breast which struck him, and he is thrown out of the rut of the wheel. There he lies, stunned, but he is not killed. Only swooned. Hasten to help him. It is my son! They form a crowd round him: is there not a doctor or surgeon among them all?”

“Oh, I shall run,” said Gilbert.

“Wait,” said Andrea, stopping him by the arm, “they are dividing to let help come. It is the doct – oh, do not let that man approach him – I loathe him – he is a vampire, he is hideous!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, do not lose sight of Sebastian,” said Gilbert, shuddering.

“This ghoul carries him away – up the street – into the blind alley, called St. Hyacinthe: where he goes down some steps. He places him on a table where books and printed papers are heaped. He takes off his coat and rolls up his sleeve. He ties the arm with bandages from a woman as dirty and hideous as himself. He finds a lance in a case – he is going to bleed him. Oh, I cannot bear to see my son’s blood flow. Run, run, and you will find him as I say.”

“Shall I awaken you at once with recollection: or would you sleep till the morning and know nothing of what has happened?”

“Awaken me at once with full memory.”

Gilbert described a double curve with his hands so that his thumbs came upon the medium’s eyelids; he breathed on her forehead and said merely:

“Awake!”

Instantly her eyes became animated; her limbs were supple; she looked at Gilbert almost without terror, and continuing, though aroused, the impulse in her vision, she cried:

“Oh, run, run, and snatch the boy from the hands of that man who causes me so much fright!”

CHAPTER XV

THE MAN WITH THE MODEL

WITH no need to be spurred in his quest, Gilbert darted through the rooms and as it would have taken too long to climb the walls, he made for the front door, which he opened himself and bounded out on the street.

Knowing Paris intimately, he reached the spot indicated by Andrea in her vision without delay and his first question to a storekeeper, who had witnessed the accident to the boy, confirmed the statement.

He proceeded straightway to the door in the alley, and knocked.

“Who knocks?” challenged a woman’s voice.

“I, the father of the wounded child whom you succored,” replied the knocker.

“Open, Albertine,” said a man’s voice: “it is Dr. Gilbert.”

He was let into a cellar, or rather cavern, down some moldering steps, lighted by a lamp set on the table cumbered with printed papers, books and manuscripts as Andrea had described.

In the shadow, and on a mattress, young Gilbert lay, but held out his arms to his father, calling him. However powerful the philosophical command in Gilbert, paternal love overruled decorum, and he sprang to the boy whom he pressed to his breast, with care not to hurt his bruised chest or his cut arm. After a long, fond kiss, he turned to thank the good Samaritan. He was standing with his feet far apart, one hand on the table, the other on his hip, lit by the lamp of which he had removed the shade the better to illumine the scene.

“Look, Albertine,” said he, “and with me thank the chance enabling me to do a good turn for one of my brothers.”

The speaker was a green and sallow man, like one of those country clowns whom Latona’s wrath pursued and who was turning to a frog. Gilbert shuddered, thinking that he had seen this abortion before as through a sheet of blood.

He drew nearer to Sebastian and hugged him once more. But triumphing over his first impulse, he went back to the strange man who had so appalled Andrea in the second-sight vision, and said:

“Receive all the thanks of a father, sir, for having preserved his son: they are sincere and come right from his heart.”

“I have merely done my duty as prescribed by nature and recommended by science,” replied the other. “I am a man, and as Terence says, nothing human is foreign to me; besides, I have a tender heart, and cannot see even an insect suffer; consequently still less my fellow man.”

“May I learn to what fervent philanthropist I have the honor to speak?”

“Do you not know your brother-physician?” said the surgeon, laughing in what he wanted to seem benevolence though it was ghastly. “I know you, Dr. Gilbert, the friend of the American patriots, and of Lafayette!” He laid peculiar stress on this name. “The republican of America and France, the honorable Utopist who has written magnificent articles on constitutional government, which you sent to Louis XVI. from the States, and for which he lodged you in the Bastile, the moment you touched French soil. You wanted to save him by clearing the road to the future, and he opened that into jail – regular royal gratitude!”

He laughed again, this time terribly and threateningly.

“If you know me it is a farther reason for me to insist on learning to whom I am indebted.”

“Oh, it is a long while since we made acquaintance,” said the surgeon. “Twenty years, sir, on the dreadful night of the thirtieth of May, 1770; the night when the fireworks exploded by accident among the people in the Paris square, and injured and killed many who came to rejoice over the wedding of the Archduchess and our Prince Royal, but who had to curse their names. You were but a boy whom Rousseau brought to me, wounded and crushed almost to death, and I bled you on a board amid the dead and the cut-off limbs. Yet that awful night is a pleasant memory to me for I was able to save many existences by my steel knowing where to dissever to preserve life and where to cut to spare pain.”

“You are Jean Paul Marat, then,” cried Gilbert, falling back a step despite himself.

“Mark, Albertine, that my name makes some effect,” said Marat with a sinister laugh.

“But I thought you were physician to Count Artois; why are you in this cave, why lighted by this smoky lamp?”

“I was the Prince’s veterinary surgeon, you mean. But he emigrated? no prince, no stables; no stables, no vet. Besides, I gave in my resignation, for I would no longer serve the tyrants.”

The dwarf drew himself up to the full extent of his form.

“But, in short, why are you in this hole?”

“Because, Master Philosopher, I am a sound patriot writing to decry the ambitious; Bailly fears me, Necker detests me, and Lafayette sets the National Guard on to hunt me down and has put a price on my head – the aspiring dictator! but I brave him! out of my hole, I pursue him, and denounce the Caesar. Do you know what he has done? He has had fifteen thousand snuffboxes made with his portrait on them, which hides some trick. So I entreat all good citizens to smash them when found. It is the rallying sign for the great Royalist Plot, for you cannot be ignorant that Lafayette is conspiring with the Queen while poor Louis is blubbering scalding tears over the blunders the Austrian is leading him into.

“The Queen,” said Gilbert pensively.

“Yes; don’t tell me that she is not plotting: lately she gave away so many white cockades that white ribbon went away up in the market. It is a fact, for I had it from one of the workgirls of Bertin the dressmaker, her Prime Minister in Fashions, who used to say: ‘I have been discussing matters this morning with her Majesty.'”

“And how do you denounce such things?” inquired the doctor.

“In my newspaper, the one I have just started, twenty numbers having appeared. It is ‘The Friend of the people or the Parisian Publicist,’ an impartial political organ. To pay for the paper and the printing – look behind you – I have sold the sheets and blankets off my bed.”

Turning, Gilbert indeed saw that Sebastian lay on the mattress absolutely bare, but he had fallen asleep, overcome with pain and fatigue. He went up to him to see that it was not a swoon, but reassured by the regular breathing he, returned to this journalist, who irresistibly inspired him with the interest we feel for a hyena, tiger or other wild beast.

“Who help you in this gigantic work?” he inquired.

“My staff?” sneered Marat. “Ha, ha, ha! the geese fly in files: the eagle soars alone. My helpers are these,” and he showed his head and hands. “I write the whole paper single handed – I can show you the copy, though it runs into sixteen pages octavo sometimes, and often I use small type though I commenced with large. So, it is not merely a newspaper – but a personality – it is Marat!”

“Enormous labor – how do you manage it?” asked the other doctor.

“It is the secret of nature – a compact I have made with death. I have given ten years of my life, so that I need no rest by day and no sleep by night. My existence is summed up in writing: I do it day and night. Lafayette’s police coop me up in this cell, where they chain me body and soul to my work: they have doubled my activity. It was heavy on me at first but I am inured to it. It delights me now to see poor humanity through this airhole, by the narrow and slanting beam. From my gloomy den I judge mankind living, and science and politics without appeal. With one hand I demolish the savants, with the other the politicians. I shall upset the whole state of things, like Samson destroying the Temple, and under the ruins perhaps crushing me, I shall bury the throne!”

In spite of himself the hearer shuddered: in his rags and the poverty-stricken vault this man repeated very nearly what Cagliostro had said in his palace under his embroidered clothes.

“But when you are so popular, why do you not try for a nomination in the National Assembly?” he asked.

“Because the day has not come for that,” replied the demagogue; expressing his regret, he continued, “Oh, were I a tribune of the masses, sustained by only a few thousand of determined men, I answer for the Constitution being perfectly safe in six weeks: the political machine should move better: no villain would dare play ticks with it: the Nation should be free and happy: in less than a year, it should be flourishing and redoubtable: and thus would it remain while I was erect.”

The vain creature was transformed under Gilbert’s eyes: his eyes became bloodshot; his yellow skin shone with sweat; the monster became great in his hideousness as another is grand in his beauty.

“Yes, but I am not a representative,” he proceeded, resuming his train of ideas from where he had interrupted himself: “I have not the thousands of followers. No, but I am a journalist, and have my weapons and ammunition, my subscribers and readers, for whom I am an oracle, a prophet and a diviner. I have my following for whom I am a friend, and I lead them on, trembling, from treachery to treachery, discovery to discovery, from one dreadful thing to another. In the first number of The Friend of the People, I denounced the upper classes saying that there were six hundred guilty wretches in France and that number of ropes-ends would do the job: but I made a mistake, ha, ha! The deeds of the fifth and sixth of October opened my eyes and I see that we must hang twenty thousand of the patricians.”

Gilbert smiled, for fury elevated to this point, seemed madness to him.

“Why, there is not enough hemp in France to do this work, and rope would go up in price,” he said.