Taking the Bastile

CHAPTER XXVI.
BILLET'S SORROW

At the time when the Queen and her consort were leaving Versailles, never more to return under its roof, the following scene was taking place in one of its inner yards, damp with the rain which a bitter fall gale was beginning to dry up.

Over a dead body a man clad in black was bending: a man in the Royal Lifeguards uniform knelt on the other side. Three paces off stood a third person, with fixed eyes and closed hands.

The body was of a young man not more than twenty-three, all of whose blood seemed to have poured out through ghastly wounds in the head and chest. His furrowed and livid white breast appeared yet to heave with the disdainful breath of hopeless defense. The head thrown back and the mouth open in pain and anger, recalled the fine figure of speech of the Ancient Romans:

And with a long-drawn wail the spirit fled to the abode of shades.

The man in black was Gilbert: the Lifeguards officer, Count Charny; the bystander, Billet.

The corpse was Viscount Valence Charny's.

Gilbert regarded it with that fixed gaze which suspends the fleeing soul in the dying and seems in the dead, able to recall the fled one.

"Cold and rigid; he is dead, and really dead," he said at last.

Charny uttered a hoarse groan and pressing the corpse in his arms, emitted so heart-rending a sob that the physician shuddered and Billet went off a little to hide his head in a corner of the quadrangle. Suddenly the mourner raised the body, set it against the wall in a sitting posture and slowly came away, but looking to see if it would not revive and follow him.

Gilbert remained on one knee, resting his chin on his hand thoughtfully, appalled and motionless.

Then Billet quitted the nook and came to him, saying, as he no longer heard the wails of the count which had made his heart ache:

"Alas, Dr. Gilbert, this is really civil war, and what you foretold is coming to pass. Only, the trouble comes sooner than I believed and perhaps sooner then you calculated. I have seen villains slaughter wicked men: I have trembled in all my limbs and felt a horror for such monsters. But yet the men who were killed so far were worthless. Now, as you predicted, they are killing honest folk. They have killed Viscount Charny; I do not shudder but I grieve; I do not feel so much horror for the murderers as fear for myself. The young gentleman has been fouly done to death, for he was only a soldier and fought; he ought not to have been butchered."

He uttered a sigh from his vitals.

"To think that I knew him when a child," he continued: "I can see him now, riding along on his little grey pony, carrying bread round to the poor on behalf of his mother. He was a fine pink and white-faced child, with big blue eyes, who was always laughing.

"Well, it is queer! since I have seen him laying there, bleeding and disfigured, it is no longer as a corpse that I think of him, but as the pretty boy with the basket on his left arm and a purse in his right hand. Really, Dr. Gilbert, I believe that I have had enough of this kind of thing, and I do not care to see any more of it, for as all you foretold is a-coming true, I shall be seeing you die, and then – "

"Be calm, Billet," said the physician, shaking his head gently, "my hour has not struck."

"But mayhap mine has. Down yonder the harvest is rotting; the land is laying unplowed; and my family languishes whom I love, and ten times more fondly since I have seen this corpse for which his family will weep."

"What are you driving at, Billet? Do you suppose that I am going to pity your fate?"

"Oh, no," answered the farmer simply; "but as I must cry out when I am in pain, and as crying out leads to nothing, I want to relieve myself in my own way. In short, I want to go home on my farm, Master Gilbert."

"What, again?"

"Look ye, a voice down there is calling me home."

"That voice is prompting you to desertion, Billet."

"I am no soldier to desert, sir."

"What you want to do is worse than desertion in a soldier."

"I should like that explained, doctor."

"You come to Paris to overthrow an old house and you turn away before the building is down."

"For fear it will tumble on my friends, yes, doctor."

"Rather, to save yourself."

"Why, there is no law against taking care of Number One," said Billet.

"A pretty calculation! as if the stones might not bound in falling and rolling, and kill the runaway at a distance."

"Oh, you know I am not to be scared."

"Then you will remain, for I have need of you here, my dear Billet."

"My folks also have need of me at home."

"Billet, Billet, I thought you had agreed with me that a man has no home when he loves his country."

"I should like to know if you would talk like that if your son Sebastian lay there in that young gentleman's stead?"

He pointed to the corpse.

"Billet, a day will come when my son will see me laid out like that," was the stoical response.

"So much the worse for you, doctor, if he is as cold as you over it."

"I hope he will bear it better than me and be all the firmer from having had my example."

"Then you want to inure the youth to seeing blood flow. At his tender age, to be accustomed to fires, murders, gibbets, riots, night attacks; to see queens insulted and kings badgered; and when he is cool like you and steel like a sword-blade, do you expect he will love and respect you?"

"No; I do not want him to see any such sights, which is why I have sent him down to Villers Cotterets along with Ange Pitou though I almost regret it at present."

"You say you are sorry for it to-day, why to-day?"

"Because he would have seen the fable of the Lion and the Mouse put in action, which would be reality to him henceforth."

"What do you mean, Dr. Gilbert?"

"I say that he would have seen a brave and honest farmer come to town, one who can neither read nor write; who never dreamed that his life could have any influence, good or bad over the highest destinies: he would have seen that this man, who was about to quit Paris, as he wishes once more to do – contribute efficaciously towards saving the King, the Queen and the two royal children."

"How is this, Dr. Gilbert?" asked Billet, staring.

"How sublimely innocent you are! I will tell you. Did you not awake at the first noise in the night, guess that the tumult was a tempest about to break on the royal residence and run to arouse General Lafayette, for the general was sleeping."

"That was natural enough; he had been riding about for twelve hours; he had not been abed for four-and-twenty."

"You led him to the palace," continued Gilbert; "you led him into the thick of the scoundrels, crying: "Back, villains, the revenger is upon ye!" "

"That's right enough; I did that."

"Well, Billet, my friend, you see that you have great compensation; though you could not prevent this young gentleman from being butchered, you did perhaps stay the great crime of the slaughter of the royal family. Ingrate, would you leave your country's service just when such a mighty reward was yours?"

"But who would know anything about it when I never suspected it myself?"

"You and I, Billet; is not that enough?"

The farmer meditated for a while before he said as he held out his hand to the physician:

"I guess you are right, doctor. But, you know, man is a weak, selfish, unsteady creature; you are the only one who is just the other style. What made you so?"

"Misfortune," replied the other, with a smile filled with more grief than a sob.

"Lord, how singular – I thought misfortune soured a man."

"Weak men, yes."

"But if I were to meet misfortune and it was to make me wicked?"

"You may meet misfortune but you will never become wicked. I answer for that."

"Then," sighed Billet, "I shall stay and see the game out. But I shall show the white feather more than once, like this."

"But I shall be at hand to uphold you."

"So be it," said the farmer. Throwing a lazy look on Viscount Charny's body, which servants came to remove, he said: "What a vastly pretty boy he was, with his laughing eye, when he rode along on his little grey with the basket and the purse – poor little master Charny!"

Poor Billet! he had not the mesmerist's prophetic soul, and he could not dream what events we have to trace, now that the King and Queen have started to Paris to follow the road marked by the Revolution's redhot plowshare; now that Charny begins to see what a winsome and noble wife he has; now that our minor characters are standing out; now that poor Ange Pitou, quitting Paris with regret is going to play a grand part in the drama of his own country – our romance is but well on the way. We shall meet our dear old friends and alas! we shall fight our stubborn old enemies in the pages of the continuation to this book, under the title of "The Hero of the People."

THE END