IV
Interlude
A few days later Le Chapelier returned André Louis’ visit. He came to the Rue du Hasard with definite news that all was well at Gavrillac, and that the people of M. de Kercadiou had taken no part in the recent provincial disturbances, now happily quelled.
And now, save that the pinch of want was still being felt by the poor, and that the queues outside the bakers’ shops increased as the autumn advanced, life resumed its habitual course. Naturally there were constant explosions of feeling in Paris, but the Parisians were becoming accustomed to living in an explosive atmosphere, and they no longer permitted it seriously to interfere with their affairs and their amusements. Even those explosions might have been avoided, but that Privilege determined to fight to the last ditch, still offered a stubborn resistance on one side, even whilst on the other it was already flinging great offerings on the altar of the fatherland. In the coming of the regiment of Flanders to Versailles in September the people saw a new menace, perceived in it a sign that Privilege was rearing again its hideous greedy head. There was a plot afoot to coerce them, to starve them at need into submission. Hence that excursion, so-called of Maenads, that march to Versailles of the market-women of Paris, led by the unique Maillard, and as an outcome in early October, the Palace of the Tuileries was cleared of all the vermin, human and otherwise, that infested it, to make room for the King. The King was to come and live among his people. His loving people desired to have him in their midst—as a hostage for their own safety. If they must starve, he should starve with them.
André-Louis observed these things, and began to wonder where they would end. The only sane nobles appeared to him to be those who had crossed the frontier before the hotheads constituting the large majority of their party should have brought destruction upon the whole class. Meanwhile, he, himself, was kept busy in his flourishing academy; so busy that he contemplated acquiring the ground-floor of No. 13 and a third assistant; he was restrained, however, by the impossibility of inducing the ground-floor tenant, a haberdasher who throve on the custom of the fencing-school upstairs, to evacuate such advantageous premises.
With that exception the whole of No. 13 was now in his hands. He had lately acquired the first floor, converting it into a comfortable dwelling for himself and his two assistants, installing a housekeeper and a boy as page.
Now that the National Assembly sat in Paris he frequently saw Le Chapelier, and the intimacy grew between them. They commonly dined together at the Palais Royal or elsewhere, and through Le Chapelier André-Louis began to make a few friends; but he avoided the salons to which he was freely invited, those salons in which the fine new republican and philosophic spirit presided.
He was present at the Comédie Française one night in the following spring when Chénier’s Charles IX was being performed more or less under protest.
It was a stormy evening. Allusions from the stage were taken up now by one section, now by another, of the audience, to be used as catchwords between the politically hostile parties between the old regime and the new. The climax was ludicrously provided by some men in the pit, who insisted upon remaining covered. The Comédie Française contained a royal box, and it was an unwritten law that respect for royalty should go the length of demanding bared heads even when this royal box was untenanted.
The men who chose to remain covered did so as a republican protest against what they considered an empty sham. But, before the storm that arose when their action was denounced, before an uproar that rendered inaudible a word from the stage, they made haste to beat a retreat from their republican arrogance—with one exception. One man stubbornly remained covered, and turned about his broad leonine head to laugh at those who demanded that he should take off his hat, his great voice trumpeting through the house: “Do you imagine that you can force me to take off my hat?”
It was the last provocation. Menaces were hurled at him. He rose to them undaunted, heaved himself up, displaying an enormous athletic frame, a Herculean neck bare to the breast below his head, an unspeakably hideous countenance. He laughed in their faces. He pressed his round headgear down more securely about his brows.
“Firm as the hat of Servandony!” he mocked them, and flourished an arm in defiance.
André-Louis laughed. There was something at once grotesque and magnificently heroic about that great figure, mocking and undaunted amid the ever increasing uproar. The affair might have ended badly had not the police intervened to arrest him and lead him out a prisoner. He was clearly not of those who yield.
“Who is he?” André-Louis asked of a neighbour, as the house was settling down again after the disorder.
“I don’t know,” he was answered. “I am told that his name is Danton, and that he is the president of the Cordeliers. He will come to a bad end, of course; madman, an original.”
Next day it was the talk of Paris, floating for a moment on the surface of more serious matter. In the fencing-academy nothing else was discussed but the Cômédie Française and the quarrel between Talma and Naudet that was at the root of all the mischief. But soon André-Louis had something else to engage his attention. He received a visit from Le Chapelier just before noon.
“I have news for you, André. Your godfather is at Meudon. He arrived there two days ago. Had you heard?”
“But no. How should I hear? Why is he at Meudon?”
He was conscious of a faint excitement, which he could hardly have explained.
“I don’t know. There have been fresh disturbances in Brittany. It may be due to that.”
“And so he has come for shelter to his brother?” asked André-Louis.
“To his brother’s house, yes; but not to his brother. Where do you live at all, André? Do you never hear any of the news? Étienne de Gavrillac emigrated months ago. He was of the household of M. d’Artois, and he crossed the frontier with him. By now, no doubt, he is in Germany with him, conspiring against France. For that is what the émigrés are doing. That Austrian woman at the Tuileries will end by destroying the monarchy.”
“Yes, yes,” said André-Louis, impatiently. Politics interested him not at all this morning. “But about Gavrillac?”
“Why, haven’t I told you that Gavrillac is at Meudon, installed in the house his brother has left? Dieu de Dieu! Don’t I speak French? I believe that Rabouillet, his intendant, is in charge of Gavrillac. I have brought you the news the moment I received it. I thought you would probably wish to go out to Meudon.”
“Of course. I will go at once—that is, as soon as I can. I can’t today, nor yet tomorrow. I am too busy here.” He waved a hand towards the inner room, where proceeded the click-click of blades, the quick moving of feet, and the voice of the instructor Le Duc.
“Well, well, this is your own affair. You are busy. I leave you now. Let us dine this evening at the Café de Foy. Kersain will be of the party.”
“A moment!” André-Louis’ voice arrested him on the threshold. “Is Mademoiselle de Kercadiou with her uncle?”
“How the devil should I know? Go and find out!”
He was gone, and André-Louis stood there a moment deep in thought. Then he turned and went back to resume with his pupil, the Vicomte de Villeniort, the interrupted exposition of the demi-contre of Danet, illustrating with a small-sword the advantages to be derived from its adoption.
Thereafter he fenced with the Vicomte, who was perhaps the ablest of his pupils at the time, and all the while his thoughts were on the heights of Meudon, his mind casting up the lessons he had to give that afternoon and on the morrow, and wondering which of these he might postpone without deranging the academy. When having touched the Vicomte three times in succession, he paused and wrenched himself back to the present, it was to marvel at the precision to be gained by purely mechanical action. Without bestowing a thought upon what he was doing, his wrist and arms and knees had automatically performed their work, like the accurate fighting engine into which constant practice for a year and more had combined them.
Not until Sunday was André-Louis able to satisfy a wish that had meanwhile grown to the proportions of a yearning. Dressed with more than ordinary care, his head elegantly coiffed—by one of those hairdressers to the nobility of whom so many were being thrown out of employment by the stream of emigration which was now flowing freely—André-Louis mounted his hired carriage, and drove out to Meudon.
The house of the younger Kercadiou no more resembled that of the head of the family than did his person. A man of the Court, where his brother was essentially a man of the soil, an officer of the household of M. le Comte d’Artois, he had built for himself and his family an imposing villa on the heights of Meudon in a miniature park, conveniently situated for him midway between Versailles and Paris, and easily accessible from either. M. d’Artois—the royal tennis-player—had been amongst the very first to emigrate. Together with the Condés, the Contis, the Polignacs, and others of the Queen’s intimate council, old Marshal de Broglie and the Prince de Lambesc, who realised that their very names had become odious to the people, he had quitted France immediately after the fall of the Bastille. He had gone to play tennis beyond the frontier—and there consummate the work of ruining the French monarchy upon which he and those others had been engaged in France. With him, amongst several members of his household, went Étienne de Kercadiou, and with Étienne de Kercadiou went his family, a wife and four children. Thus it was that the Seigneur of Gavrillac, glad to escape from a province so peculiarly disturbed as that of Brittany—where the nobles had shown themselves the most intransigent of all France—had come to occupy in his brother’s absence the courtier’s handsome villa at Meudon.
That he was quite happy there is not to be supposed. A man of his almost Spartan habits, accustomed to plain fare and self-help, was a little uneasy in this sybaritic abode, with its soft carpets, profusion of gilding, and battalion of sleek, silent-footed servants—for Kercadiou the younger had left his entire household behind. Time, which at Gavrillac he had kept so fully employed in agrarian concerns, here hung heavily upon his hands. In self-defence he slept a great deal, and but for Aline, who made no attempt to conceal her delight at this proximity to Paris and the heart of things, it is possible that he would have beat a retreat almost at once from surroundings that sorted so ill with his habits. Later on, perhaps, he would accustom himself and grow resigned to this luxurious inactivity. In the meantime the novelty of it fretted him, and it was into the presence of a peevish and rather somnolent M. de Kercadiou that André-Louis was ushered in the early hours of the afternoon of that Sunday in June.