The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty
“Oh, I?” said Cagliostro, smiling, “like yourself I have been rubbing
shoulders with kings, but with another aim. You go up to them to uphold
them; I to knock them over. You try to manufacture a constitutional
monarch and will not succeed; I, to make emperors, kings and princes
democratic, and I am coming on.”
“Are you really?” queried Gilbert with an air of doubt.
“Decidedly. It must be allowed that they were prepared for me by
Voltaire, Alembert and Diderot, admirable Mecaenases, sublime contemners
of the gods, and also by the example of Frederick the Great, whom we
have the misfortune to lose. But you know we are all mortal, except the
Count of St. Germain and myself.
“So long as the Queen is fair, my dear Gilbert, and she can recruit
soldiers to fight among themselves, kings who fret to push over thrones
have never thought of hurling over the altar. But we have her brother,
Kaiser Joseph II. who suppresses three-fourths of the monasteries,
seizes ecclesiastical property, drives even the Camelite nuns out of
their cells, and sends his sister prince of nuns trying on the latest
fashions in hats and monks having their hair curled. We have the King of
Denmark, who began by killing his doctor Struensee, and who, at
seventeen, the precocious philosopher, said: ‘Voltaire made a man of me
for he taught me to think.’ We have the Empress Catherine, who made such
giant strides in philosophy that--while she dismembered Poland, Voltaire
wrote to her: ‘Diderot, Alembert and myself are raising altars to you.
We have the Queen of Sweden and many princes in the Empire and
throughout Germany.'”
“You have nothing left you but to convert the Pope, my dear master, and
I hope you will, as nothing is beyond you.”
“That will be a hard task. I have just slipped out of his claws. I was
locked up in Castle Sanangelo as you were in the Bastile.”
“You don’t say so? did the Romans upset the castle as the people of St.
Antoine Ward overthrew the Bastile?”
“No, my dear doctor, the Romans are a century behind that point. But, be
easy: it will come in its day: the Papacy will have its revolutionary
days, and Versailles and the Vatican can shake hands in equality at that
era.”
“I thought that nobody came alive out of Castle Sanangelo?”
“Pooh! what about Benvenuto Cellini, the sculptor?”
“You had not wings such as he made, had you, and did you flit over the
Tiber like a new Icarus?”
“It would be the more difficult as I was lodged for the farther security
in the blackest dungeon of the keep. But I did get out, as you see.”
“Bribed the jailor with gold?”
“I was out of luck, for my turnkey was incorruptible. But, fortunately,
he was not immortal. Chance--the believers say, Providence--well, the
Architect of the Universe granted that he should die on the morrow of
his refusing to open the prison doors. He died very suddenly! and he had
to be replaced.”
“The new hand was not unbribable?”
“The day of his taking up his office, as he brought me the soup, he
said: ‘Eat heartily and get your strength, for we have to do some stiff
traveling this night.’ By George, the good fellow told no lie. That same
night we rode three horses out dead, and covered a hundred miles.”
“What did the government say when your disappearance was known?”
“Nothing. The dead and still-warm other jailer was clad in the clothes I
left behind; and a pistol was fired in his face; it was laid by his side
and the statement was given out that in despair at having no escape and
with the useless weapon which I had procured none could tell how, I had
blown out my brains. It follows that I am officially pronounced dead and
buried; the jailer being interred in my name. It will be useless, my
dear Gilbert, my saying that I am alive, for the certificate of my death
and burial will be produced to prove that I am no more. But they will
not have to do anything of the sort as it suits me to be thought passed
away at this date. I have made a dive into the sombre river, as the
poets say, but I have come up under another name. I am now Baron Zanone,
a Genoese banker. I discount the paper of princes--good paper in the
sort of Cardinal Prince Rohan’s, you know. But I am not lending money
merely for the interest. By the way, if you need cash, my dear Gilbert,
say so? You know that my purse, like my heart, is always at your call.”
“I thank you.”
“Ah, you think to incommode me, because you met me in my dress as a
workman? do not trouble about that; it is merely one of my disguises;
you know my ideas about life being one long masquerade where all are
more or less masked. In any case, my dear boy, if ever you want money,
out of my private cash box here--for the grand cash box of the
Invisibles is in St. Claude Street--come to me at any hour, whether I am
at home or not--I showed you the little, side door; push this spring
so--“ he showed him the trick--“and you will find about a million
ready.”
The round top of the desk opened of itself on the spring being pressed,
and displayed a heap of gold coin and bundles of banknotes.
“You are in truth a wonderful man!” exclaimed Gilbert; “but you ought to
know that with twenty thousand a-year, I am richer than the King. But do
you not fear being disquieted in Paris?”
“On account of the matter of the Queen’s Necklace for which I was forbid
the realm? Go to! they dare not. In the present ferment of minds I have
only to speak one word to evoke a riot: you forget that I am friendly
with all the popular leaders--Lafayette, Necker, Mirabeau and yourself.”
“What have you come to do at Paris?”
“Who knows? perhaps what you went over to the United States to do--found
a republic.”
“France has not a republican turn of mind,” said the other, shaking his
head.
“We shall teach her that way, that is all. It has taken fifteen hundred
years to rule with a monarchy; in one hundred the Republic will be
founded to endure--why not as long?”
“The King will resist; the nobility fly to arms; and then what will you
do?”
“We will make a revolution before we have the Republic.”
“It will be awful to do that, Joseph,” said Gilbert, hanging his head.
“Awful indeed, if we meet many such as you on the road.”
“I am not strong, but honest,” said the doctor.
“That is worse: so I want to bring you over.”
“I am convinced--not that I shall prevent you in your work, but will
stay you.”
“You are mad, Gilbert; you do not understand the mission of France in
Europe. It is the brain of the Old World, and must think freely so that
the world will be the happier for its thought. Do you know what
overthrew the Bastile?”
“The people.”
“No: public opinion. You are taking the effect for the cause.”
“For five hundred years they have been imprisoning nobles in the Bastile
and it stood. But the mad idea struck an insane monarch one day to lock
up thought--the spirit which must be free, and requires space unto
immensity, and crack! it burst the walls and the mob surged in at the
breach.”
“True enough,” mused the younger man.
“Twenty-six years ago, Voltaire wrote to Chauvelin: ‘All that I see is
sowing Revolution round us, and it will inevitably come though I shall
not have the bliss to see the harvest. The French are sometimes slow to
come into the battle but they get there before the fight is over. Light
is so spread from one to another, that it will burst forth in a mass
soon, and then there will be a fine explosion. The young men are happy
for they will behold splendors. What do you say about the flare-ups of
yesterday and what is going on to-day?'”
“Terrible!”
“And what you have beheld in the way of events?”
“Dreadful!”
“We are only at the beginning.”
“Prophet of evil!”
“For instance, I was at the house of a man of merit, a doctor of
medicine and a philanthropist: what do you think he was busy over?”
“Seeking the remedy for some great disease.”
“You have it. He is trying to cure, not death, but life.”
“What do you mean?”
“Leaving epigrams aside, I mean that there not being means enough for
quitting life, he is inventing a very ingenious machine which he reckons
to present to his fellow countrymen, to put fifty or eighty persons to
death in an hour. Well, my dear Gilbert, do you believe that so human a
philanthropist, so distinguished a physician as Dr. Louis Guillotin,
would busy himself about such an instrument unless he felt the want of
it?
“I know that this is not so much a novelty as a machine forgotten, as a
proof of which I showed it as an image in a glass of water to Marie
Antoinette. She was then espoused to the Dauphin of France, now its
sovereign, and it was down at Taverney where you were a dependent. The
old baron was alive then, and the lady of the manor was Mdlle. Andrea.”
“Ah,” sighed Gilbert at this reminder of his boyhood.
“But at the first you had eyes only for the servant-maid, Nicole,
afterwards Olive Legay, as the Dauphiness, to whom she bore an amazing
resemblance by the bye, is the Queen of France. Well I repeat that the
future Queen was shown by me this instrument to which I shall suggest no
name, though the olden ones are the Maiden, the Widow and the _Mannaya_
in my country. The thing so alarmed her that she swooned dead away. It
was in limbo at the era, but you shall see it at work presently if it be
successful; and then you must be blind if you do not spy the hand of
heaven in it all, it being foreseen that the time would come when the
headsman would have his hands too full and that a new method must be
devised.”
“Count, your remarks were more consoling when we were in America.”
“I should rather think they were! I was in the midst of a people who
rose and here in society which falls. In our Old World, all march
towards the grave, nobility and royalty, and this grave is a bottomless
pit.”
“Oh, I abandon the nobility to you, count, or rather it threw itself
away in the night of the fourth of August; but the royalty must be saved
as the national palladium.”
“Big words, my dear Gilbert: but did the palladium save Troy? Do you
believe it will be easy to save the realm with such a king?”
“But in short he is the descendant of a grand race.”
“Eagles that have degenerated into parrots. They have been marrying in
and out till they are rundown.”
“My dear sorcerer,” said Gilbert, rising and taking up his hat, “you
frighten me so that I must haste and take my place by the King.”
Cagliostro stopped him in making some steps towards the door.
“Mark me, Gilbert,” he said, “you know whether I love you or not and if
I am not the man to expose myself to a hundred sorrows to aid you to
avoid one--well, take this piece of advice: let the King depart, quit
France, while it is yet time. In a year, in six months, in three, it
will be too late.”
“Count, do you counsel a soldier to leave his post because there is
danger in his staying?”
“If the soldier were so surrounded, engirt, and disarmed that he could
not defend himself: if, above all, his life exposed meant that of half a
million of men--yes, I should bid him flee. And you yourself, Gilbert,
you shall tell him so. The King will listen to you unless it is all too
late. Do not wait till the morrow but tell him to-day. Do not wait till
the afternoon but tell him in an hour.”
“Count, you know that I am of the fatalist school. Come what come may!
so long as I shall have any hold on the King it will be to retain him in
France, and I shall stay by him. Farewell, count: we shall meet in the
action: perhaps we shall sleep side by side on the battlefield.”
“Come, come, it is written that man shall not elude his doom however
keen-witted he may be,” muttered the magician: “I sought you out to tell
you what I said, and you have heard it. Like Cassandra’s prediction it