Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 by Various

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She then returned, and having locked the door to prevent his second inroad,
sat down by the side of my couch, and, with the usual passion of women
after strong excitement, burst into exclamations and tears. What I could
collect from her broken narrative, was little more than the commonplace of
national misery in that fearful time. She had been a servant in the family
of the nobleman whose daughter I had saved from death. She had been the
nurse of the young countess; and all the blessings that sorrow and
gratitude ever gathered together, could not be exceeded by the praises
which she poured upon my head. It had been rumoured in the town that I was
attacked and killed by a body of cavalry sent to revenge the rout of their
comrades. And the Marquis Lanfranc--I now first learned the name of my
noble entertainer--had gone forth to look for my remains in the field. I
was found still breathing, and to avoid further danger was carried to this
dwelling, a hunting-lodge in the heart of the forest; there I had been
attended by the family physician only, and, after a week of insensibility,
had given signs of recovery. The marquis's humanity had brought evil on
himself. His visits to the lodge had been remarked, and on this very
morning he had been arrested, and conveyed with his daughter, in a
carriage escorted by _gendarmes_ to the capital. My detection followed of
course; papers found on my person had proved that I was an agent of
England; and the officious M. Gilet had spent the morning in exhibiting to
the peasantry of the neighbourhood the order of the "Committee of Public
Safety," a name which froze the blood, to take me under his charge, and
conduct me forthwith to their tribunal. I tell all this in my own way; for
the dame's sighs, sobs, and vehement indignation, would have defied all
record.

My prospect was now black enough, for justice was a word unheard of in the
present condition of things; and my plea of being an Englishman, and in
the civil service of my country, would have been a death-warrant. I must
acknowledge, too, that I had fairly thrown it away by my adoption of the
Prussian sabre. I might well be now in low spirits; for the guillotine was
crushing out life at that moment in every province of France, and the
thirst of public curiosity was to be fed by nothing but blood. Yet, even
in that moment, let me give myself credit for the recollection, my first
enquiry was for the fate of my squadron. The old woman could tell me but
little on the subject; but that little was consolatory. The French
troopers, who had come back triumphing into the town, had not brought any
Prussian prisoners: two or three foreigners, who had lost their horses,
were sheltered in her master's stables until they could make their escape;
and of them she had heard no more. The truth is, that nothing is more
difficult in war than to catch a hussar who understands his business; and
the probability was, that the chief part of them had slipped away, leaving
the French to sabre each other in the dark. The fall of my horse had
brought me down, otherwise I might have escaped the shot which stunned me,
and been at that hour galloping to Berlin.

Monsieur Gilet, with some of the civic authorities, paid me a second visit
in the evening, to prepare me for my journey. To me it was become
indifferent whether I died in the carriage or by the edge of the
guillotine; the journey was short in either case, and the shorter and
sooner the better. I answered none of their interrogatories; told them I
was at their disposal; directed the old woman to pack up whatever
travelling matters remained to me, and to remember me to her master and
mistress, if she ever should see them in this world; shook her strong old
hand, and bade God bless her. In return, she kissed me on both cheeks,
whispered a thousand benedictions, and left the room violently sobbing;
yet with a parting glance at Monsieur Gilet and his _collaborateurs_, so
mingled of wrath and ridicule, that it was beyond all my deciphering.

"Time and the hour run through the longest day,"

says the great poet; and, with the coming of midnight, a _chaise de poste_
drew up at the door. As I was a prisoner of importance, M. Gilet was not
suffered to take all the honour of my introduction to the axe on himself;
and the mayor and deputy-mayor of the district insisted on this
opportunity of making themselves known to the supreme Republic. They
mounted the box in front, a couple of gendarmes sat behind, M. Gilet took
his seat at my side, and, with an infinite cracking of whips, we rushed
out upon the causeway.

I soon discovered that my companion was by no means satisfied with
existing circumstances. The officiousness of the pair of mayors
prodigiously displeased him. He broke forth--

"See these two beggars," he exclaimed, "pretending to patriotism! They
have no energy, no courage, no civism. Why, _you_ might have remained for
a twelvemonth under their very nostrils before they would have found you
out. Gilet is the man for the service of his country." Merely to stop the
torrent of his complainings, I asked him some vague questions relative to
the nobleman whom I was now following to Paris. But the patriot was not to
be moved from his topic.

"Hah! Citizen Lanfranc. All is over with him. He once held his head high
enough, but it will soon be as low as ever it was high. Yet I could have
forgiven his aristocracy, if he had not put these two 'chiens' above me."

The position in which the mayor and his deputy sat, on the box of the
chaise, continually presenting them to the eye of my companion, kept his
choler peculiarly active.

"One of these fellows," he exclaimed, "was the Marquis's cook, another his
perruquier! _I_ was his tailor. Every man of taste and talent knows the
superiority of _my_ profession; for what is the first of noblemen without
elegance of costume, or what indeed would man himself be without my art,
the noblest and the earliest art of mankind? And yet he made these two
'brigands' mayor and deputy--_peste_! I did my duty. I denounced him on
the spot. I did more. The aristocrat had a faction in the town. It was
filled with his dependents. In fact, it had been built on his grounds, and
tenanted by the old hangers-on of the family. So, to make a clear stage, I
denounced the town." He clapped his hands with exultation at this civic
triumph.

My recollection of the miseries which his malice had caused roused me into
wrath, and, rash as the act was, I grasped him by the collar, with the
full intent of throwing the little writhing wretch out of the window; but,
while I was lifting him from the seat to which he clung screaming for help,
and had already forced him halfway outside, a shot whistled close by the
head of the postilion, which brought him to a full stop. "Mon
Dieu!--Brigands!" exclaimed Monsieur Gilet; and, dropping back into the
carriage, attempted to make a screen of my body by slipping his adroitly
behind me. Two or three more discharges rattled through the trees,
followed by a rush of peasants, who unceremoniously knocked down the two
officials in front, and began a general scuffle with the gendarmes. The
night was so dark, that I could discover nothing of the _melee_ but by the
blaze of the fusils. All, however, was quiet in a few moments, by the
disappearance of the gendarmes, and the complete capture of the convoy--M.
Gilet, mayors, and all. Whether we had fallen into the hands of highwaymen,
or of stragglers from the French army, was doubtful for a while, as not a
syllable was spoken, nor a sound uttered, except by the unhappy
functionaries, who grumbled prodigiously as they were dragged along
through "rough and smooth, moss and mire," and whose pace was evidently
quickened by many a kick and blow of the fusil. This was a rude march for
me, too, with my unhealed wound, and my week's sojourn in bed; but I was
treated, if not with tenderness, without incivility, while my _compagnons
de voyage_ were insulted with every contemptuous phrase in a vocabulary at
least as rich in those matters as any other in Europe. At length, after
about an hour's rapid movement, we reached an open ground, and the door of
one of the wide, old, staring, yet not uncomfortable farmhouses which are
to be found in the northern provinces of France.

Signs of comfort within were visible even at a distance, and the light of
a huge wood fire had been seen for the last quarter of an hour gleaming
through the woods, and leaving us in doubt whether we were approaching a
horde of gipsies, or about to realize the classic scenes of Gil Blas.

But it was only a farm-house after all. The good dame of the house, with
an enormous cap, enormous petticoats, enormous earrings, and all the
glaring good-humour of a countenance of domestic plenty and power, came to
meet us on the threshold; and her reception of me was ardent, to the very
verge of stranglulation. Nothing could exceed her rapture at the sight of
me, or the fierceness of her embraces, except her indignation at the sight
of my traveling companions. Her disgust at the mayor and his deputy--and
certainly after their night trip they were not figures to charm the
eye--was pitched in the highest key of scorn, so as to be surpassed only
by the torrent of contempt which her well-practised elocution poured upon
the "_traitre tailleur._" I really believe, that, if she could have
boiled him in the huge soup-kettle which bubbled upon the fire, without
spoiling our supper, she would have flung him in upon the spot. The
peasants who had captured us--bold, tall fellows, well dressed and well
armed with cutlass and fusil, in the style of the
_gardes-de-chasse_--could scarcely be kept from taking them out to the
next tree, to make marks of them; and it was probably by my intercession
alone that they were consigned to an outer house for the night. How the
scene was to end with me, I knew not; though the jovial visage of my
protectress showed me that I was secure. But the prisoners had no sooner
been flung out of the door than I was ushered into an inner room, prepared
with somewhat more of attention; where, to my great surprise and delight,
the Marquis Lanfranc came forward to shake my hand, and, with a thousand
expressions of gratitude, made me known to his daughter. The adventure was
of the simplest order. The arrest of the Marquis was, of course, known in
an instant, and a party of his foresters had immediately determined to
take the law into their own hands--had posted themselves on the road by
which his carriage was to pass, and had released him without difficulty.
My release was merely a sequel to the drama. I had been left in the
hunting-lodge by its owner, under the impression that an individual who
could not be moved without hazard to life, would escape the vengeance of
village patriotism. But the nurse, whom he had placed in charge of me, had
no sooner ascertained that I was arrested, than she sent an express to the
farm-house. The consequence naturally followed in my liberty; and the
night which I expected to have spent freezing on my way to the dungeon,
presented me with the pleasant exchange of hospitable shelter, the society
of a most accomplished man, and his graceful handsome daughter; and last,
not least, a couple of kisses from my late nurse, according to the custom
of the country, as glowing and remorseless as those of my portly landlady
herself.

We sat for some hours, and scarcely felt them pass in the anxious topics
which engrossed us; the perils of France, the prospects of the Allies, and
the captivity of the unhappy Bourbons. Now and then the conversation
turned on their own hair-breadth escapes, and those of their relatives and
friends. Among the rest, the hazards of the De Tourville family were
mentioned, and I heard the name of Clotilde pronounced with a sensation
indescribable. The name was connected with such displays of fortitude,
nobleness of spirit, and deep devotion to the royal cause, that, if I had
loved before, I now honoured her. She had saved the lives of her household;
she had, by an act of extraordinary, but most perilous affection, saved
the life of her mother, at the moment when the first insurgency broke out;
and, young as she was, she had exhibited so noble a union of generosity
and strength of mind, that the Marquis's eyes filled with tears as he told
it, and Amalia buried her forehead in her hands to conceal her convulsive
emotions: what must have been mine!

Our conversation was not unfrequently interrupted by bursts of merriment
from the outer room, where the peasants were at supper provided by the
Marquis for his bold rescuers--an indulgence which they seemed to enjoy
with the highest zest imaginable. Songs were sung with very various kinds
of merit in the performer, but all well received. Healths were proposed,
in which the existing Government was certainly not much honoured; and, if
the good wishes of the party could have sent the "Committee of Public
Safety," the butcher cabinet of France, to the darkest spot on earth, or
under it, its time would have been brief. But even this died away; the
laugh subsided, the mirth grew silent, and at length the
_gardes-de-chasse_ went away, making the forest ring with their
professional whoops and holloas, the remnants of their honest revel. At
length the Marquis and his daughter, who were to be on the wing at
daybreak for the German frontier, and who had generously offered to take
charge of my invalid frame in the same direction, retired; and wrapping
myself up in a dark cloak, furnished by my mistress and formed to her
showy proportions, I threw myself on the sofa, and was in the land of
dreams.

But though I slept, I did not rest. My fever, or my lassitude, or probably
some presentiment of the troubled career into which I was to be plunged,
made "tired nature's sweet restorer" a stepmother to me. I can never
endure hearing the dreams of others, and thus I cannot suffer myself to
inflict them on my hearers; but on that night, Queen Mab, like Jehu, drove
her horses furiously. Every possible kind of disappointment, vexation, and
difficulty; every conceivable shape of things, past and present, rushed
through my brain; and all pale, fierce, disastrous, and melancholy. I was
beckoned along dim shades by shapeless phantoms; I was trampled in battle;
I was brought before a tribunal; I was on board a ship which blew up, and
was flung strangling down an infinite depth in a midnight ocean. But this
exceeded the privilege even of dreams. I made one desperate effort to rise,
and awoke with a bound on the floor. There I found a real obstacle--a
ruffian in a red cap. One strong hand was on my throat; and by the glimmer
of the dying lantern, which hung from the roof, I saw the glitter of a
pistol-barrel in the other. "Surrender in the name of the Republic!" were
the words which told me my fate. Four or five wearers of the same ominous
emblem, with sabres and pistols, were round me at the moment, and after a
brief struggle I was secured. Cries were now heard outside the door, and a
wounded gendarme was carried in, borne in the arms of his comrades. From
their confused clamour, I could merely ascertain that the gendarmes who
had escaped in the original _melee_, had obtained assistance, and returned
on their steps. The farm-house had been surrounded, and the Marquis was
indebted only to the vigilance of his peasantry for a second escape with
his daughter. The _gardes-de-chasse_ had kept the gendarmes at bay until
their retreat was secure; and the post-chaise which had brought M. Gilet
and his coadjutors, was, by this time, some leagues off, at full speed,
beyond the fangs of Republicanism.

This at least was comfort, though I was left behind. But it was clear that
the gallant old noble was blameless in the matter, and that nothing was to
be blamed but my habitual ill luck. "_En route_ for Paris," was the last
order which I heard; and with a gendarme, in the strange kind of
post-waggon which was rolled out from the farmer's stable, I was
dispatched, before daybreak, on my startling journey.

I found my gendarme a facetious fellow; though his merriment might not be
well adapted to cheer his prisoner. He whistled, he sang, he screamed, he
stamped, to get rid of the ennui of travelling with so silent a companion.
He told stories of his own prowess; libeled M. Gilet, who had got him
beaten on this service in the first instance, and who seemed to be in the
worst possible odour with man and woman; and abused all, mayors,
deputy-mayors, and authorities, with the tongue of a leveler. But my
facetious friend had his especial _chagrins_.

"I have all my life," said he, "been longing to see Paris, and have never
been able to stir a step beyond this stupid province. Yet I have had my
chances too. I was once valet to a German count, and we were on the way to
Paris together when the post-chaise was stopped, the baron was arrested as
a swindler, and I was charged as his accomplice. He was sent to the
galleys; I got off. I then had a second chance. I enlisted in a regiment
of dragoons which was to be quartered in Versailles. But such was my fate,
I had no sooner passed the first drill, when we were ordered off to
Lorraine to watch old King Stanislaus, the Pole, who lived there like one
of his own bears, frozen and fat. Still I was determined to see Paris. I
asked leave of absence; the adjutant laughed at me, the colonel turned on
his heel, and the provost-marshal gave me a week of the black-hole. But a
week is but seven days after all, and on my seeing the parade again--I--"

"You deserted?"

"Not quite that," was the reply. "I took leave, and, as I had seen enough
of the black hole already, I took good care to give the provost-marshal no
notice on the subject. A fortnight's march brought me within sight of the
towers of Notre-Dame. But as I was resting myself on the roadside, our
adjutant, as ill luck would have it, came by in the _coupe_ of the
diligence. He jumped out. I was seized, given up to the next guard-house,
and after fitting me with a pair of fetters, by way of boots, I was
ordered to take my passage with a condemned regiment for the West Indies.
There I served ten years; I saw the regiment reduced to a skeleton by
short rations and new rum; and returned the tenth representative of
fifteen hundred felons. At last I have a chance; the gendarme of the
village was so desperately mauled by the foresters in the attempt to carry
you prisoner, that he has been forced to take to his bed, and let me take
his place. The thing is certain now. _You_ will be guillotined, but I
shall see Paris."

Yet what is certain in this most changeful of possible worlds?

"Fate granted half the prayer,
The rest the gods dispersed in empty air."

We had toiled through our long journey, rendered doubly long by the
dreariest and deepest roads on earth, and were winding round the spur of
Montmartre, when a troop of citizen heroes, coming forth to sweep the
country of the retreating Prussians, and whose courage had risen to the
boiling point by the news of the retreat, surrounded the carriage. My
Prussian uniform was proof enough for the brains of the patriots; and the
quick discovery of Parisian ears, that I had not learned my French in
their capital, settled the question of my being a traitor. The gendarme
joined in the charge with his natural volubility; but rather insisted
rashly on his right to take his prisoner into Paris on his own behalf. I
saw a cloud gathering on the brow of the _chef_, a short, stout, and
grim-looking fellow, with the true Faubourg St Antoine physiognomy. The
prize was evidently too valuable not to be turned to good account with the
authorities; and he resolved on returning at the head of his brother
patriots to present me as the first-fruits of his martial career. The
dispute grew hot; my escort was foolish enough to clap his hand on the
hilt of his sabre--an affront intolerable to a citizen, at the head of
fifty or sixty _braves_ from the counter or the shambles; the result was,
a succession of blows from the whole troop, which closed in my seeing him
stripped of every thing, and flung into the _cachot_ of the _corps de
garde_, from which his only view of his beloved Paris must have been
through an iron _grille_.

My captor, determined to enter the capital for once with eclat, seated
himself beside me in the _chaise de poste_, and, surrounded by his
pike-bearers, we began our march down the descent of the hill.

My new friend was communicative. He gave his history in a breath. He had
been a clerk in the office of one of the small tribunals in the south;
inflamed with patriotism, and indignant at the idea of selling his talents
at the rate of ten sous a-day, "in a rat-hole called a bureau," he had
resolved on being known in the world, and to Paris he came. Paris was the
true place for talent. His _civisme_ had become conspicuous; he had
"assisted" at the birth of liberty. He had carried a musket on the 10th of
August, and had "been appointed by the Republic to the command of the
civic force," which now moved, before and behind me. He was a "_grand
homme_" already. Danton had told him so within the last fortnight, and
France and Europe would no sooner read his last pamphlet on the "Crimes of
Kings," than his fame would be fixed with posterity.

I believe that few men have passed through life without experiencing times
when it would cost them little to lay it down. At least such times have
occurred to me, and this was among them. Yet this feeling, whether it is
to be called nonchalance or despair, has its advantages for the moment; it
renders the individual considerably careless of the worst that man can do
to him; and I began to question my oratorical judge's clerk on the events
in the "city of cities." No man could take fuller advantage of having a
listener at his command.

"We have cut down the throne," said he, clapping his hands with exultation,
"and now you may buy it for firewood. But you are an aristocrat, and of
course a slave; while we have got liberty, equality, and a triumvirate
that shears off the heads of traitors at a sign. Suspicion of being
suspected is quite sufficient. Away goes the culprit; a true patriot is
ordered to take possession of his house until the national pleasure is
known; and thus every thing goes on well. Of course, you have heard of the
clearance of the prisons. A magnificent work. Five thousand aristocrats,
rich, noble, and enemies to their country, sent headless to the shades of
tyrants. _Vive la Republique_! But a grand idea strikes me. You shall see
Danton himself, the genius of liberty, the hero of human nature, the
terror of kings." The thought was new, and a new thought is enough to turn
the brain of the Gaul at any time. He thrust his head out of the window,
ordered a general halt; and, instead of taking me to the quarters of the
National, resolved to have the merit of delivering up an "agent of Pitt
and English guineas" to the master of the Republic alone. "_A l'Abbaye_!"
was his cry. But a new obstacle now arose in his troop; they had reckoned
on a civic supper with their comrades of the guard; and the notion of
bivouacking in front of the Abbaye, under the chilling wind and fierce
showers which now swept down the dismal streets, was too much for their
sense of discipline. The dispute grew angry. At length one of them, a huge
and savage-looking fellow, who, by way of illustration, thrust his pike
close to the little commandant's shrinking visage, bellowed out--

"The people are not to be insulted. The people order, and all must obey!"
Nothing could be more unanswerable, and no attempt was made to answer. The
captain dropped back into the chaise, the troop took their own way, and my
next glance showed the street empty. But the Frenchman finds comfort under
all calamities. After venting his wrath in no measured terms on "rabble
insolence," and declaring that laws were of no use when "_gueux_" like
these could take them into their hands, he consoled himself by observing
that, stripped as he was of his honours, the loss might be compensated by
his profits; that the "vagabonds" might have expected to share the reward
which the "grand Danton would infallibly be rejoiced to give for my
capture, and that both the purse and the praise would be his own." "_A
l'Abbaye_!" was the cry once more.

We now were in motion again; and, after threading a labyrinth of streets,
so dreary and so dilapidated as almost to give me the conception that I
had never been in Paris before, we drove up to the grim entrance of the
Abbaye. My companion left me in charge of the sentinel, and rushed in.
"And is this," thought I, as I looked round the narrow space of the four
walls, "the spot where so many hundreds were butchered; this the scene of
the first desperate triumph of massacre; this miserable court the last
field of so many gallant lives; these stones the last resting-place of so
many whose tread had been on cloth of gold; these old and crumbling walls
giving the last echo to the voices of statesmen and nobles, the splendid
courtiers, the brilliant orators, and the hoary ecclesiastics, of the most
superb kingdom of Europe!" Even by the feeble lamp-light, that rather
showed the darkness than the forms of the surrounding buildings, it seemed
to me that I could discover the colour of the slaughter on the ground; and
there were still heaps in corners, which looked to me like clay suddenly
flung over the remnants of the murdered.

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