Edmond Dantès
to obedience and concert the conflicting impulses of others? Armand
Carrel was a wonderful man. His motto, like that of Danton, was this:
'Audacity, audacity, always audacity!' Yet with all the audacity of
Danton, he had little of his firmness. An officer under the Restoration,
a conspirator at Bifort, in arms in Spain against the white flag, three
times a prisoner before a council of war--in 1830 he was with Thiers,
the founder of this journal; but everywhere he carried the exactitude of
the camp; even in dress, manner and bearing he was a soldier--lofty,
haughty, seemingly overbearing, yet, at heart, noble and generous, and
to his friends accessible in the extreme. To his military notions,
nothing could be accomplished without soldiers, and for the people to
carry a revolution against soldiers seemed to him absurd."
"Armand Carrel would have been, nevertheless, a good revolutionist,
Louis," said Marrast; "but he was a bad conspirator. He had no faith in
the people, no confidence in the efforts of undisciplined and unarmed
masses."
"And therein," said Rollin, "he greatly erred."
"Although we can as yet boast of having accomplished but very little by
them, Ledru," added Flocon, with a meaning smile. "The masses are easily
roused, but they don't stay roused, and then they often get
unmanageable, even by those by whose summons they were stirred up. They
fight well, but, somehow or other, they always get beaten; they succumb
at last, and bow their necks to the yoke lower than ever."
"It is not the people," said Louis Blanc, "it is we the leaders, who are
to be blamed. We rouse them before we are ready for them--before we have
prepared them or anything else for a result; and then it is not strange
that they only rush bravely on to death and defeat. We seize on the
occasion of a funeral for an outbreak without organization, and the
cuirassiers of the military escort trample our ranks beneath their
horses' hoofs. But for unusual efforts, such would have been the case at
the funeral of Dulong, the Deputy who fell in a duel with General
Bugeaud, in January of '34."
"What were the circumstances?" asked Rollin.
"Armand recollects them better than I," replied Louis Blanc.
"The circumstances were these, as I remember them," said Marrast.
"General Bugeaud remarked in the course of a speech in the Chamber that
'obedience is always a soldier's duty.' 'What if the order be to become
a turnkey?' asked Dulong, in allusion to the General's position in
relation to the Duchess of Berri, during her pregnancy and confinement
at Baye. Armand Carrel endeavored to pacificate, but the effort failed.
They met in the Bois de Boulogne at ten o' clock in the morning; the
weapons were pistols; the distance forty paces. Bugeaud fired almost as
soon as he turned, advancing only a few steps; his ball entered above
Dulong's right eye, and at six o'clock that evening he was dead."
"There was a splendid ball at the Tuileries that night, was there not?"
asked Flocon.
"There was, and this, with other things, excited in the masses the idea
that their champion was the victim of a Royalist conspiracy, which all
the influence of Armand Carrel and Dulong's uncle, Dupont de l'Eure was
hardly sufficient to suppress. But Dupont immediately resigned his seat
in the Chamber. He would sit no longer in a body one man of which he
deemed the murderer of a beloved nephew. The obsequies were grand.
Armand Carrel pronounced the eulogy, and two hundred and thirty-four
deputies wet the grave with their tears. The people were greatly
excited, and, as has been said, were with great difficulty restrained
by Carrel and Dupont. Had they been suffered to revolt, the only result
which could have followed would have been a terrific outpouring of their
blood, furnishing another instance, I suppose, of the evil of
impatience; is it not so, Louis?"
"Undoubtedly," was the reply; "and only two months after that other
instance actually occurred, for our warning, in the revolt at Lyons,
with which we are all familiar, and in which we were all actors, most of
us to our sorrow. This was in April. Albert's journal, 'La Glaneuse,'
had been seized for libel on the Government, and the editor fined and
imprisoned. Next a reform banquet of the operatives was forbidden,
although but a year before Garnier Pages had been suffered to banquet
the Lyonnese to the number of two thousand, and although at no period
had so many gorgeous festivities and public balls been given by the rich
Royalists, as if in premeditated scorn of the banquet prohibited to the
poor Republicans. The result was so prompt as to seem inevitable; there
was a strike of the operatives, an insurrection of the people. Albert
was sent to Paris as an envoy, to find a man to lead the revolt. MM.
Cabet and Pages were deemed too moderate. Cavaignac would go only with
Cabet. Lafayette was too feeble, but gave his name and letters. Carrel
and Marrast were not members of the Societe des Droits de l'Homme, and
Albert had been cautioned that Carrel was too moderate. Thiers had
denounced 'La Tribune,' and Marrast's friends were hiding him from the
police. In despair concerning his mission, the envoy was about returning
home, when he was sent for to Armand Carrel's house, and Carrel offered
to go to Lyons and lead the revolt, provided Godefroi Cavaignac would
accompany him. Now these friends had long been at feud, but all private
grievances were forgotten in this crisis of the cause, and Albert is
just about preceding them in the post-chaise, to announce their coming,
when, lo! the telegraph says, 'Order reigns in Lyons!' Here, then, after
a terrific slaughter, was recorded another fruitless revolt, because a
premature one. Nay, it was infinitely worse than fruitless. Not only did
the Republicans utterly fail in their attempts, not only were they
cruelly crushed by the Royal mercenaries, but they were openly derided
in their defeat, and the cause was gloomier than ever. The slaughter of
women and children in the streets of Lyons, and on their own
hearthstones, in the course of this insurrection, was hideous, and is
graphically portrayed in the memorial of our friend Ledru Rollin, as
advocate in the matter. But, as if all this were not enough for our
persecuted cause, the decease of the great and good Lafayette, the idol
of freemen all the world over, took place in the following May. Alas!
his sun went down in clouds. His end was dark. Bitter maledictions
quivered on his dying lips. He had lived to mourn that July day, only
three years before, when, on the steps of the Hotel de Ville, he had,
with his own hands, been called to invest a cold-blooded, perfidious,
selfish, and most ungrateful tyrant with Royal robes. Alas! there was
order in Lyons--Lafayette was in his grave--peace reigned in Paris--the
House of Orleans triumphed!"
"Those were dark days," said Marrast, sadly.
"They were, dear Armand, dark, indeed, for you and your friends, for
your journal had been suppressed, and you were an inmate, with
Cavaignac, of Sainte-Pelagie."
"Whence you both, bravely and boldly effected your escape more than a
year afterwards and fled to England, to the most glorious discomfiture
of the knaves who put you there!" cried Rollin. "Vive la Republique!
yet, Messieurs! We've all seen dark days, and the present is none of the
brightest; and we've all come together at these old headquarters of
liberty just to be unhappy together, just to help each other be
miserable, which, in fact, is vastly happier unhappiness than being
miserable alone. At all events, that's what I want. But it can't always
be right. I predict a revolution before another ten years shall have
rolled round, which shall make immortals of us all--that revolution for
which we have been waiting, watching, toiling and writing, lo! now these
thirteen years and upward, for the which waiting, watching, toiling and
writing we have some of us been fined, who had money enough to pay a
fine, and others imprisoned and hunted about and persecuted. Why,
there's Albert and Flocon haven't been able to get a franc cleverly warm
in their pockets these ten years, before forth it was drawn in the form
of a fine; while as for Marrast, he has the perfect air and bearing of a
bandit, so often has he seen the inside of a dungeon; and our friend
Albert isn't much better looking. As for Louis and myself, why, we never
knew what it was to have a franc get warm in our pockets, so we escaped
having any drawn forth by Ministers, and they have never thought us
worth prosecuting or imprisoning. But they may change their minds when
Louis' book, that is to make us all immortal, comes out. Eh, Louis?"
Louis Blanc smiled, but made no answer.
"Well, it is only meet, I suppose, that I should receive my share of the
blows," said Marrast. "I'm sure I'm not very delicate or very
ceremonious in bestowing them. Besides, every one of my predecessors has
endured the same--Carrel, Thomas, Bastide; while poor Rouen, the
proprietor, would have been ruined, indeed, a dozen times with fines,
but for his enormous profits. Why, this old office has been a perfect
butt for Ministers to fire at--it has received a dozen fusillades, at
least; but it stands yet, and, strange as may have been the scenes it
has witnessed, it will witness yet other and stranger ones, and we shall
all be witnesses thereof, and actors in them, too, or greatly do I err."
"So be it, with all our hearts!" was the general shout.
"Apropos of State prosecutions against 'Le National,'" said Louis Blanc,
"that was a most exciting time when Rouen was brought by Thiers before
the Court of Peers, for a libel on that most august and erudite body."
"Aye! and a most, liberal, honest and honorable conclave--the
thrice-sodden and most solemn knaves and mules!" cried Rollin.
"Rouen at the bar demanded Armand Carrel for his defence," continued
Louis Blanc. "To refuse was impossible, but a bitter pill must it have
been to Thiers and Mignet to consent. They must have foreseen what came.
Both, now in the Ministry, only four years before both had been in 'Le
National'--Thiers as the colleague of Carrel, and Mignet as a
collaborateur. The files of the journal were produced, and, lo! there
stood paragraphs proven to have emanated from the pens of the
prosecutors far more libelous and venomous on the august peers than
anything Rouen had published. You all remember the scene that ensued and
won't forget it soon."
"No; nor shall we soon forget that noble passage in Armand Carrel's
defence," said Flocon, "in which he evoked the shade of Marshal Ney, and
from the wild excitement that followed, one would suppose that it had
really risen in the hall, bleeding and ghastly, and pointing to its
wounds, like the ghost of Banquo, to blast his hoary, jeweled and noble
assassin, who, seated on those very seats, had sentenced him to an
infamous doom. Carrel was instantly stopped, but General Excelmens rose
in his seat and pronounced the charge true. It was then reiterated with
tremendous applause from the galleries. How Carrel escaped punishment
for contempt is not known. Rouen was convicted of libel on the peers, of
course; his sentence was a fine of ten thousand francs and imprisonment
for two years."
"But of what words did this famous libel actually consist?" asked Ledru
Rollin.
"Louis can tell you better than I," said Flocon.
"Why, the words were severe enough, no doubt," replied Louis Blanc, "but
Thiers and Mignet had themselves expressed the same ideas a hundred
times, though in less powerful and pointed language. The passage which
seems particularly to have given offence was this, that in the eyes of
eternal justice and those of posterity, as well as in the testimony of
their own consciences, these renegades from the Revolution, these