The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty
down from a plain private carriage at the door of St. Roch’s church,
where the throng was great. They were Dr. Gilbert and Baron Zannone, as
Cagliostro chose to call himself at this epoch.
“Will you come into the nave or sit in the gallery?” asked the magician.
“I thought the nave was kept for the members?” said the other.
“Just so, but am I not a member of all societies?” returned the
Arch-master laughing. “Besides, this club is but the seat of the
Invisibles, and you can enter as one of the Rosicrucians. We are sixty
thousand strong in France alone in three months since foundation as
Jacobins, and will be four hundred thousand in a year.”
“Though I am a Rose-Croix, I prefer to be in the gallery where I can see
over the crowd and you can better tell me of the persons whom I descry.”
The seats were roughly knocked up in tiers and a wooden staircase led up
them. Cagliostro made a sign and spoke a word to two who were sitting in
the already filled seats and they got up to give them their places as if
they had been sent before to keep them.
The place was ill lighted in the growing gloom but it was clear that
these were the best sort of the revolutionists, while the uniforms of
officers of the army and navy abounded. For the common brothers held
their meetings in the crypt. Here the literati and artists were in the
majority.
Casting a long look around, Gilbert was encouraged by seeing that most
were not so very hostile to the royal cause.
“Whom do you see here hostile to royalty?” he inquired of his guide.
“In my eyes there are but two.”
“Oh, that is not many among four hundred men.”
“It is quite enough when one will be the slayer of Louis XVI. and the
other his successor.”
“A future Brutus and a future Caesar here?” exclaimed the doctor
starting.
“Oh, apostle with scales over your eyes,” said Cagliostro; “you shall
not only see them but touch them. Which shall I commence with?”
“By the overthrower; I respect chronology: let us have Brutus first.”
“You know that men do not use the same means to accomplish a like work,”
said Cagliostro, animated as by inspiration. “Therefore our Brutus will
not resemble the antique one.”
“That makes me the more eager to see ours.”
“There he is.”
He pointed to a man leaning against the rostrum in such a position that
his head alone was in the light. Pale and livid, this head seemed
dissevered from the trunk. The eyes seemed to shine with a viper’s
expression, with almost scornful hatred, knowing his venom was deadly.
Gilbert felt a creeping of the flesh.
“You were right to warn me,” he said; “this is neither Brutus nor
Cromwell.”
“No, it is rather Cassius the pale-faced and leaned man whom the Emperor
dreaded most. Do you not know him?”
“No; or rather I have seen him in the Assembly. He is one of the
longest-winded speechifyers of the Left, to whom nobody listens. A
pettifogger from Arras----“
“The very man.”
“His name is Maximilian Robespierre.”
“Just so. Look at him. You are a pupil of Lavater the physiognomist.”
“I see the spite of mediocrity for genius as he watches Barnave.”
“In other words you judge like the world. I grant that he cannot expect
to make a hit among all these proven orators; but at least you cannot
accuse him of immorality; he is the Honest Man: he never steps outside
of the law, or only to act within a new law which he legally makes.”
“But what is this Robespierre?” asked the other.
“You ask that as Strafford did of the future Lord Protector: ‘What is
this Cromwell? a brewer!’ But he cut off his head, mark, you aristocrat
of the Seventeenth Century!”
“Do you suggest that I run the same risk as Charles First’s Minister,”
said Gilbert, trying to smile, but it was frozen on his lips.
“Who can tell?” replied the diviner.
“The more reason for me to inquire about him.”
“Who is Robespierre? he was born in Arras, of Irish extraction, in 1758.
He was the best pupil in the Jesuits’ College and won a purse on which
he came to study at Paris. It was at the same college where your young
Sebastian had an experience. Other boys went out sometimes from those
sombre aisles which bleach the pallid, and had holidays with their
families and friends; young Robespierre was cooped up and breathed the
bad air of loneliness, sadness and tedium; three bad things which rob
the mind of its bloom and blight the heart with envy and hatred. The boy
became a wilted young man. His benefactor had him appointed judge, but
his tender heart would not let him dispose of the life of a man; he
resigned and became a lawyer. He took up the case of peasants disputing
with the Bishop of Arras and won their just claim; the grateful boors
sent him up to the Assembly. There he stood between the clergy’s
profound hatred for the lawyer who had dared speak against their bishop
and the scorn of the nobles for the scholar reared by charity.”
“What is he doing?”
“Nothing for others but much for the Revolution. If it did not enter
into my views that he should be kept poor, I would give him a million
francs to-morrow. Not that I should buy him, for he is joked with as the
Incorruptible! Our noble debaters have settled that he shall be the butt
of the House, for all assemblies must have one. Only one of his
colleagues understands and values him--it is Mirabeau. He told me the
other day, ‘that man will go far for he believes what he says!'”
“This grows serious,” muttered Gilbert.
“He comes here for he gets an audience. The Jacobin is a young minotaur:
suckling a calf, he will devour a nation in a while. I promised to show
you an instrument for lopping off heads, did I not? Well, Robespierre
will give it more work than all those here.”
“Really, you are funereal, count,” said Gilbert; “if your Caesar does
not compensate for your Brutus, I may forget what I came here for.”
“You see my future Emperor yonder, talking with the tragic actor Talma,
and with another whom he does not know but who will have a great
influence over him. Keep this befriender’s name in mind--Barras, and
recall it one of these days.”
“I do not know how right you are, but you choose your typical characters
well,” said Gilbert; “this Caesar of yours has the brow to wear a crown
and his eyes--but I cannot catch the expression----“
“Because his sight is diverted inwards--such eyes study the future,
doctor.”
“What is he saying to Barras?”
“That he would have held the Bastile if he were defending it.”
“He is not a patriot, then?”
“Such as he are nothing before they are all in all.”
“You seem to stick to your idea about this petty officer?”
“Gilbert,” said the soothsayer, extending his hand towards Robespierre,
“as truly as that man will re-erect the scaffold of Charles Stuart, so
truly will ‘this one'”--he indicated the lieutenant of the line
regiment--“will re-erect the throne of Charlemagne.”
“Then our struggle for liberty is useless,” said Gilbert discouraged.
“Who tells you that he may not do as much for us on his throne as the
other on his scaffold?”
“Will he be the Titus, or Marcus Aurelius, the god of peace consoling us
for the age of bronze?”
“He will be Alexander and Hannibal in one. Born amid war, he will thrive
in war-fare and go down in warring. I defy you to calculate how much
blood the clergy and nobles have made Robespierre lose by his fits of
spite against them; take all that these nobles and priests will lose,
multiply upon multiplications, and you will not attain the sea of blood
this man will shed, with his armies of five hundred thousand men and his
three days’ battles in which hundreds of cannon-shots will be fired.”
“And what will be the outcome of all this turmoil--all this chaos?”
“The outcome of all genesis, Gilbert. We are charged to bury this Old
World. Our children will spring up in a new one. This man is but the
giant who guards the door. Like Louis XIV., Leo X. and Agustus, he will
give his name to the era unfolding.”
“What is his name?” inquired Gilbert, subjugated by Cagliostro’s
convinced manner.
“His name is Buonaparte; but he will be hailed in History as Napoleon.
Others will follow of his name, but they will be shadows--the dynasty of
the first Charlemagne lasted two hundred years; of this second one, a
tithe: did I not tell you that in a hundred years the Republic will have
the empire of France?”
Gilbert bowed his head. He did not notice that the debates were opened.
An hour passed when he felt a powerful hand grip his shoulder.
He turned: Cagliostro had disappeared and Mirabeau stood in his
place--after the eagle, the lion.
Mirabeau’s face was convulsed with rage as he roared in a dull voice:
“We are flouted, deceived, betrayed! the court will not have me and you
have been taken for a dupe as I for a fool. On my moving in the House
that the Cabinet Ministers should be invited to be present at the
Assembly sessions, three friends of the King proposed that no member of
the House should be a minister. This laboriously managed combination
dissolves at a breath from the King; But,” concluded Mirabeau, like
Ajax, shaking his mighty fist at the sky, “by my name, I will pay them
for this, and if their breath can shake a minister, mine shall overthrow
the throne. I shall go to the Assembly and fight to the uttermost; I am
one of those who blow up the fort and perish under the ruins.”
He rushed away, more terrible and handsomer for the divine streak which
lightning had impressed on his brow.
Gilbert did not go to the House to witness his companion’s defeat--one
very like a victory. He was musing at home over Cagliostro’s strange
predictions. How could this man foresee what would be Robespierre and
Napoleon? I ask those who put this question to me how they explain
Mdlle. Lenormand’s prediction to the Empress Josephine? One often meets
inexplicable things; doubt was invented to comfort those who cannot
explain them but will not believe them.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE SMILE AND THE NOD.
As Cagliostro had said and Mirabeau surmised, the King had upset the
scheme.
Without much regret the Queen saw the constitutional platform fall which
had wounded her pride. The King’s policy was to gain time and profit by
circumstances; besides he had two chances of getting away into some
stronghold, which was his favorite plan. These two plans, we know, were
his brother Provence’s, managed by Favras; the other his own, managed by
Charny.
The latter reached Metz in a couple of days where the faithful royalist
Bouille did not doubt him, but resolved to send his son Louis to Paris
to be more exactly informed on the matter. Charny remained as a kind of
hostage.
Count Louis Bouille arrived about the middle of November. At this period
the King was guarded closely by Lafayette whose cousin the young count
was.
To keep him in ignorance of Charny’s negociations, the latter worked to
be presented to the King by his kinsman.
Providence answered the envoy’s prayer for Lafayette, who had been
informed of his coming but swallowed his excuse that it was on a visit
to a sweetheart in Paris, offered to take him with him on his morning
call on the monarch.
All the palace doors opened to the general. The sentinels presented arms
and the footmen bowed, so that Count Louis could see that his relative
was the real King of Paris.
The King was in his forge so that the visitors had to see the Queen
first.
Bouille had not seen her for three years. The sight of her at
thirty-four, a prisoner, slandered, threatened, and hated, made a deep
impression on the chivalric heart of the young noble.
She remembered him at a glance and with the same was sure this was a
friendly face. Without busying about General Lafayette she gave her hand
for the young man to kiss, which was a fault such as she plentifully