Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini [inspirational books txt] 📗

You are surely not of those who weave dreams about Orléans? He has a sort of party, a following largely recruited by the popular hatred of the Queen and the known fact that she hates him. There are some who have thought of making him regent, some even more; Robespierre is of the number.”

“Who?” asked André-Louis, to whom the name was unknown.

“Robespierre⁠—a preposterous little lawyer who represents Arras, a shabby, clumsy, timid dullard, who will make speeches through his nose to which nobody listens⁠—an ultra-royalist whom the royalists and the Orléanists are using for their own ends. He has pertinacity, and he insists upon being heard. He may be listened to some day. But that he, or the others, will ever make anything of Orléans⁠ ⁠… pish! Orléans himself may desire it, but the man is a eunuch in crime; he would, but he can’t. The phrase is Mirabeau’s.”

He broke off to demand André-Louis’ news of himself.

“You did not treat me as a friend when you wrote to me,” he complained. “You gave me no clue to your whereabouts; you represented yourself as on the verge of destitution and withheld from me the means to come to your assistance. I have been troubled in mind about you, André. Yet to judge by your appearance I might have spared myself that. You seem prosperous, assured. Tell me of it.”

André-Louis told him frankly all that there was to tell. “Do you know that you are an amazement to me?” said the deputy. “From the robe to the buskin, and now from the buskin to the sword! What will be the end of you, I wonder?”

“The gallows, probably.”

“Pish! Be serious. Why not the toga of the senator in senatorial France? It might be yours now if you had willed it so.”

“The surest way to the gallows of all,” laughed André-Louis.

At the moment Le Chapelier manifested impatience. I wonder did the phrase cross his mind that day four years later when himself he rode in the death-cart to the Grève?

“We are sixty-six Bréton deputies in the Assembly. Should a vacancy occur, will you act as suppléant? A word from me together with the influence of your name in Rennes and Nantes, and the thing is done.”

André-Louis laughed outright. “Do you know, Isaac, that I never meet you but you seek to thrust me into politics?”

“Because you have a gift for politics. You were born for politics.”

“Ah, yes⁠—Scaramouche in real life. I’ve played it on the stage. Let that suffice. Tell me, Isaac, what news of my old friend, La Tour d’Azyr?”

“He is here in Versailles, damn him⁠—a thorn in the flesh of the Assembly. They’ve burnt his château at La Tour d’Azyr. Unfortunately he wasn’t in it at the time. The flames haven’t even singed his insolence. He dreams that when this philosophic aberration is at an end, there will be serfs to rebuild it for him.”

“So there has been trouble in Brittany?” André-Louis had become suddenly grave, his thoughts swinging to Gavrillac.

“An abundance of it, and elsewhere too. Can you wonder? These delays at such a time, with famine in the land? Châteaux have been going up in smoke during the last fortnight. The peasants took their cue from the Parisians, and treated every castle as a Bastille. Order is being restored, there as here, and they are quieter now.”

“What of Gavrillac? Do you know?”

“I believe all to be well. M. de Kercadiou was not a Marquis de La Tour d’Azyr. He was in sympathy with his people. It is not likely that they would injure Gavrillac. But don’t you correspond with your godfather?”

“In the circumstances⁠—no. What you tell me would make it now more difficult than ever, for he must account me one of those who helped to light the torch that has set fire to so much belonging to his class. Ascertain for me that all is well, and let me know.”

“I will, at once.”

At parting, when André-Louis was on the point of stepping into his cabriolet to return to Paris, he sought information on another matter.

“Do you happen to know if M. de La Tour d’Azyr has married?” he asked.

“I don’t; which really means that he hasn’t. One would have heard of it in the case of that exalted Privileged.”

“To be sure.” André-Louis spoke indifferently. “Au revoir, Isaac! You’ll come and see me⁠—13 Rue du Hasard. Come soon.”

“As soon and as often as my duties will allow. They keep me chained here at present.”

“Poor slave of duty with your gospel of liberty!”

“True! And because of that I will come. I have a duty to Brittany: to make Omnes Omnibus one of her representatives in the National Assembly.”

“That is a duty you will oblige me by neglecting,” laughed André-Louis, and drove away.

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