The Last Man
demoniac fury had crept among the emigrants, yet several adhered with
fidelity to their noble chieftain; and many, whose faith and love had
been unhinged by fear, felt all their latent affection rekindled by
this detestable attempt. A phalanx of faithful breasts closed round
him; the wretch, who, although a prisoner and in bonds, vaunted his
design, and madly claimed the crown of martyrdom, would have been torn
to pieces, had not his intended victim interposed. Adrian, springing
forward, shielded him with his own person, and commanded with energy
the submission of his infuriate friends—at this moment I had entered.
Discipline and peace were at length restored in the castle; and then
Adrian went from house to house, from troop to troop, to soothe the
disturbed minds of his followers, and recall them to their ancient
obedience. But the fear of immediate death was still rife amongst these
survivors of a world’s destruction; the horror occasioned by the
attempted assassination, past away; each eye turned towards Paris. Men
love a prop so well, that they will lean on a pointed poisoned spear;
and such was he, the impostor, who, with fear of hell for his scourge,
most ravenous wolf, played the driver to a credulous flock.
It was a moment of suspense, that shook even the resolution of the
unyielding friend of man. Adrian for one moment was about to give in,
to cease the struggle, and quit, with a few adherents, the deluded
crowd, leaving them a miserable prey to their passions, and to the
worse tyrant who excited them. But again, after a brief fluctuation of
purpose, he resumed his courage and resolves, sustained by the
singleness of his purpose, and the untried spirit of benevolence which
animated him. At this moment, as an omen of excellent import, his
wretched enemy pulled destruction on his head, destroying with his own
hands the dominion he had erected.
His grand hold upon the minds of men, took its rise from the doctrine
inculcated by him, that those who believed in, and followed him, were
the remnant to be saved, while all the rest of mankind were marked out
for death. Now, at the time of the Flood, the omnipotent repented him
that he had created man, and as then with water, now with the arrows of
pestilence, was about to annihilate all, except those who obeyed his
decrees, promulgated by the _ipse dixit_ prophet. It is impossible to
say on what foundations this man built his hopes of being able to carry
on such an imposture. It is likely that he was fully aware of the lie
which murderous nature might give to his assertions, and believed it to
be the cast of a die, whether he should in future ages be reverenced as
an inspired delegate from heaven, or be recognized as an impostor by
the present dying generation. At any rate he resolved to keep up the
drama to the last act. When, on the first approach of summer, the fatal
disease again made its ravages among the followers of Adrian, the
impostor exultingly proclaimed the exemption of his own congregation
from the universal calamity. He was believed; his followers, hitherto
shut up in Paris, now came to Versailles. Mingling with the coward band
there assembled, they reviled their admirable leader, and asserted
their own superiority and exemption. At length the plague, slow-footed,
but sure in her noiseless advance, destroyed the illusion, invading the
congregation of the elect, and showering promiscuous death among them.
Their leader endeavoured to conceal this event; he had a few followers,
who, admitted into the arcana of his wickedness, could help him in the
execution of his nefarious designs. Those who sickened were immediately
and quietly withdrawn, the cord and a midnight-grave disposed of them
for ever; while some plausible excuse was given for their absence. At
last a female, whose maternal vigilance subdued even the effects of the
narcotics administered to her, became a witness of their murderous
designs on her only child. Mad with horror, she would have burst among
her deluded fellow-victims, and, wildly shrieking, have awaked the dull
ear of night with the history of the fiend-like crime; when the
Impostor, in his last act of rage and desperation, plunged a poignard
in her bosom. Thus wounded to death, her garments dripping with her own
life-blood, bearing her strangled infant in her arms, beautiful and
young as she was, Juliet, (for it was she) denounced to the host of
deceived believers, the wickedness of their leader. He saw the aghast
looks of her auditors, changing from horror to fury—the names of those
already sacrificed were echoed by their relatives, now assured of their
loss. The wretch with that energy of purpose, which had borne him thus
far in his guilty career, saw his danger, and resolved to evade the
worst forms of it—he rushed on one of the foremost, seized a pistol
from his girdle, and his loud laugh of derision mingled with the report
of the weapon with which he destroyed himself.
They left his miserable remains even where they lay; they placed the
corpse of poor Juliet and her babe upon a bier, and all, with hearts
subdued to saddest regret, in long procession walked towards
Versailles. They met troops of those who had quitted the kindly
protection of Adrian, and were journeying to join the fanatics. The
tale of horror was recounted—all turned back; and thus at last,
accompanied by the undiminished numbers of surviving humanity, and
preceded by the mournful emblem of their recovered reason, they
appeared before Adrian, and again and for ever vowed obedience to his
commands, and fidelity to his cause.
[22] Shakespeare—Julius Cæsar.
[23] Elton’s Translation of Hesiod’s “Shield of Hercules.”
CHAPTER VII.
These events occupied so much time, that June had numbered more than
half its days, before we again commenced our long-protracted journey.
The day after my return to Versailles, six men, from among those I had
left at Villeneuve-la-Guiard, arrived, with intelligence, that the rest
of the troop had already proceeded towards Switzerland. We went forward
in the same track.
It is strange, after an interval of time, to look back on a period,
which, though short in itself, appeared, when in actual progress, to be
drawn out interminably. By the end of July we entered Dijon; by the end
of July those hours, days, and weeks had mingled with the ocean of
forgotten time, which in their passage teemed with fatal events and
agonizing sorrow. By the end of July, little more than a month had gone
by, if man’s life were measured by the rising and setting of the sun:
but, alas! in that interval ardent youth had become grey-haired;
furrows deep and uneraseable were trenched in the blooming cheek of the
young mother; the elastic limbs of early manhood, paralyzed as by the
burthen of years, assumed the decrepitude of age. Nights passed, during
whose fatal darkness the sun grew old before it rose; and burning days,
to cool whose baleful heat the balmy eve, lingering far in eastern
climes, came lagging and ineffectual; days, in which the dial, radiant
in its noon-day station, moved not its shadow the space of a little
hour, until a whole life of sorrow had brought the sufferer to an
untimely grave.
We departed from Versailles fifteen hundred souls. We set out on the
eighteenth of June. We made a long procession, in which was contained
every dear relationship, or tie of love, that existed in human society.
Fathers and husbands, with guardian care, gathered their dear relatives
around them; wives and mothers looked for support to the manly form
beside them, and then with tender anxiety bent their eyes on the infant
troop around. They were sad, but not hopeless. Each thought that
someone would be saved; each, with that pertinacious optimism, which to
the last characterized our human nature, trusted that their beloved
family would be the one preserved.
We passed through France, and found it empty of inhabitants. Some one
or two natives survived in the larger towns, which they roamed through
like ghosts; we received therefore small encrease to our numbers, and
such decrease through death, that at last it became easier to count the
scanty list of survivors. As we never deserted any of the sick, until
their death permitted us to commit their remains to the shelter of a
grave, our journey was long, while every day a frightful gap was made
in our troop—they died by tens, by fifties, by hundreds. No mercy was
shewn by death; we ceased to expect it, and every day welcomed the sun
with the feeling that we might never see it rise again.
The nervous terrors and fearful visions which had scared us during the
spring, continued to visit our coward troop during this sad journey.
Every evening brought its fresh creation of spectres; a ghost was
depicted by every blighted tree; and appalling shapes were manufactured
from each shaggy bush. By degrees these common marvels palled on us,
and then other wonders were called into being. Once it was confidently
asserted, that the sun rose an hour later than its seasonable time;
again it was discovered that he grew paler and paler; that shadows took
an uncommon appearance. It was impossible to have imagined, during the
usual calm routine of life men had before experienced, the terrible
effects produced by these extravagant delusions: in truth, of such
little worth are our senses, when unsupported by concurring testimony,
that it was with the utmost difficulty I kept myself free from the
belief in supernatural events, to which the major part of our people
readily gave credit. Being one sane amidst a crowd of the mad, I hardly
dared assert to my own mind, that the vast luminary had undergone no
change—that the shadows of night were unthickened by innumerable shapes
of awe and terror; or that the wind, as it sung in the trees, or
whistled round an empty building, was not pregnant with sounds of
wailing and despair. Sometimes realities took ghostly shapes; and it
was impossible for one’s blood not to curdle at the perception of an
evident mixture of what we knew to be true, with the visionary
semblance of all that we feared.
Once, at the dusk of the evening, we saw a figure all in white,
apparently of more than human stature, flourishing about the road, now
throwing up its arms, now leaping to an astonishing height in the air,
then turning round several times successively, then raising itself to
its full height and gesticulating violently. Our troop, on the alert to
discover and believe in the supernatural, made a halt at some distance
from this shape; and, as it became darker, there was something
appalling even to the incredulous, in the lonely spectre, whose
gambols, if they hardly accorded with spiritual dignity, were beyond
human powers. Now it leapt right up in the air, now sheer over a high
hedge, and was again the moment after in the road before us. By the
time I came up, the fright experienced by the spectators of this
ghostly exhibition, began to manifest itself in the flight of some, and
the close huddling together of the rest. Our goblin now perceived us;
he approached, and, as we drew reverentially back, made a low bow. The
sight was irresistibly ludicrous even to our hapless band, and his
politeness was hailed by a shout of laughter;—then, again springing up,
as a last effort, it sunk to the ground, and became almost invisible
through the dusky night. This circumstance again spread silence and
fear through the troop; the more courageous at length advanced, and,
raising the dying wretch, discovered the tragic explanation of this
wild scene. It was an opera-dancer, and had been one of the troop which
deserted from Villeneuve-la-Guiard: falling sick, he had been deserted
by his companions; in an access of delirium he had fancied himself on