Adventures of the Comte de la Muette during the Reign of Terror

William Blackwood And Sons Edinburgh And London MDCCCXCVIII

_All Rights reserved_

[Dedication.]

To R. C., Best Counsellor And Helpmate.

Contents.

I. THE WAXWORKS II. CITOYENNE CARINNE III. THE FOOTPAD IV. THE CHÂTEAU DES PIERRETTES V. LA GRAND’ BÊTE VI. THE HERD OF SWINE VII. THE CHEVALIER DU GUET VIII. QUATREMAINS-QUATREPATTES IX. THE WILD DOGS X. THE AFFAIR OF THE CANDLES XI. PYRAMUS AND THISBE XII. THE MOUSE-TRAP XIII. THE RED CART XIV. THE QUARRIES OF MONT-ROUGE XV. THE SALAD COURSE NOTES

Adventures Of The Comte De La Muette.

Chapter I. The Waxworks.

One morning I awoke in La Bourbe and looked across at Deputy Bertrand as he lay sprawled over his truckle-bed, his black hair like a girl’s scattered on the pillow, his eyelids glued to his flushed cheeks, his face, all blossoming with dissipation, set into the expression of one who is sure of nothing but of his own present surrender to nothingness. Beside him were his clothes, flung upon a chair, the tri-colour sash, emblematic stole of his confused ritual, embracing all; and on a nail in the wall over his head was his preposterous hat, the little _carte de civisme_ stuck in its band.

Casimir Bertrand (one time Casimir Bertrand de Pompignan) I had known and been friendly with at Le Plessis. Later he had imbibed theories; had become successively a Lameth, a Feuillant, a Jacobin--a constitutionalist, a moderate, an extremist; had spouted in the Faubourgs and overflowed in sectional Committee rooms; had finally been elected to represent a corner of the States-General. I had known him for a pious prig, a coxcomb, a reckless bon-vivant. He was always sincere and never consistent; and now at last, in the crisis of his engaging sans-cullotism, he had persuaded me, a proscribed royalist, to take an advantage of his friendship by lodging with him. Then it was that the driving-force behind his character was revealed to me. It was militant hedonism. Like Mirabeau, he was a strange compound of energy and voluptuousness. He turned altogether on the nerves of excitement. He was like a clock lacking its pendulum, and he would crowd a dozen rounds of the dial into the space of a single hour. Such souls, racing ahead of their judgment, illustrate well the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise; and necessarily they run themselves down prematurely. Casimir was an epicure, with a palate that could joyfully accommodate itself to black bread and garlic; a sensualist, with the power to fly at a word from a hot-bed of pleasure to a dusty desert of debate. Undoubtedly in him (did I make him the mirror to my conscience), and in a certain Crépin, with whom I came subsequently to lodge, and who was of the type only a step lower in the art of self-indulgence, I had an opportunity to see reflected a very serious canker in the national constitution.

Now he opened his eyes as I gazed on him, and shut them again immediately. It was not his habit to be a slug-a-bed, and I recognised that his sleep was feigned. The days of his political influence were each pregnant of astonishing possibilities to him, and he was too finished an epicure to indulge himself with more than the recuperative measure of slumber--frothed, perhaps, with a bead of æsthetic enjoyment in the long minute of waking.

“Casimir!” I called softly; but he pretended not to hear me.

“What, my friend! the sun is shining, and the eggs of the old serpent of pleasure will be hatching in every kennel.”

He opened his eyes at that, fixed and unwinking; but he made no attempt to rise.

“Let them crack the shells and wriggle out,” he said. “I have a fancy they will be a poisonous brood, and that La Bourbe is pleasantly remote from their centres of incubation.”

“Timorous! I would not lose a thrill in this orgy of liberty.”

“But if you lost----?” he checked himself, pursed his lips, and nodded his head on the pillow.

“Jean-Louis, I saw the Sieur Julien carried to the scaffold last night. He went foaming and raving of a plot in the prisons to release the aristocrats in their thousands upon us. There is an adder to reproduce itself throughout the city! Truly, as you say, the kennels will swarm with it.”

“And many will be bitten? My friend, my friend, there is some dark knowledge in that astute head of yours. And shall I cower at home when my kind are in peril?”

“My faith! we all cower in bed.”

“But I am going out.”

“Be advised!” (He struggled quickly up on his elbow. His face bore a clammy look in the sunlight.) “Be advised and lie close in your form--like a hare, Jean-Louis--like a hare that hears the distant beaters crying on the dogs. Twitch no whisker and prick not an ear. Take solace of your covert and lie close and scratch yourself, and thank God you have a nail for every flea-bite.”

“What ails thee of this day then, morose?”

“What ails this Paris? Why, the Prussians are in Verdun, and the aristocrats must be forestalled.”

“But how, Deputy.”

“I do not know. I fear, that is all.”

“Well, there lies your sash--the talisman to such puerile emotions.”

“Return to bed, Jean-Louis. It is unwise to venture abroad in a thunderstorm.”

“It is unwiser to shelter beneath a tree.”

“But not a roof-tree. Oh, thou fool! didst thou not close thine eyes last night on a city fermenting like a pan of dough?”

“‘Et cette alarme universelle Est l’ouvrage d’un moucheron.’”

“But go your way!” he cried, and scrambled out of bed.

He walked to the little washstand with an embarrassed air, and set to preparing our morning cup of chocolate from the mill that stood thereon.

“After all,” he said, when the fragrant froth sputtered about his nostrils, “the proper period to any exquisite sensation is death. I dread no termination but that put to an hour of abstinence. To die with the wine in one’s throat and the dagger in one’s back--what could kings wish for better?”

He handed me my cup, and sipped enjoyingly at his own.

“I am representative of a constituency,” he said, “yet a better judge of wine than of men. The palate and the heart are associated in a common bond. That I would decree the basis of the new religion. ‘Tears of Christ’!--it is a vintage I would make Tallien and Manuel and Billaud de Varennes drunk on every day.”

He laughed in an agitated manner, and glanced at me over the rim of his cup.

“Go your way, Jean-Louis,” he repeated; “and pardon me if I call it the right mule one. But you will walk it, for I know you. And eat your fill of the sweet thistle-flowers before the thorns shall stab your gullet and take all relish from the feast.”

“Casimir!” I cried in some black wonder--“this is all the language of a villain or an hysteric----!”

I paused, stared at his twitching face, took up my hat quietly, and left the room.

* * * * * * *

A little frost on a foot, or a little blood. What is the significance of either. Once the _bimbelotiers_ of the Palais Royal used to manufacture cards of Noël, very pretty and sparkling with rime. That was before the apotheosis of the “Third [or butterfly] State”; and many a time, during the winter of ’84, I have seen poor vagrants of the chosen brood, unwitting yet of the scarlet wings developing underneath their rugged hides, ponder over the fanciful emblems in the shop windows, and then look down with wonder at their own cracked and bleeding toes. To whom, then, could the frost appeal in this dainty guise? Not surely to those who must walk with bare feet? It is all the point of view, said the philosophers. But, they added, blood is warm, and it is well to wear socks of it if you can get no other. Put these on and look again, and you will see differently.

Not just yet, perhaps; and in the meantime the king empties his private purse to buy wood for the freezing people. This will warm them into loyalty while it lasts; and they crawl out of their icy burrows, or gather up their broken limbs on the snow beds--whereinto they have been ground by the sleds and chariots of the wealthy that rush without warning down the muffled streets--to build monuments of snow to the glory of their rulers. Then by-and-by these great obelisks melt, and add their quota to the thaw that is overwhelming what the frost has spared.

The red socks! Now, on this wild Sunday of September, when the monuments that bore the names of the good king and queen are collapsed and run away some eight years, the tocsin is pealing with a clamour of triumph from the steeples; for at last the solution of the riddle has been vouchsafed to the “Third State,” and it knows that to acquire the right point of view it must wear socks, not of its own blood but of that of the aristocrats, to whom the emblems of Noël were made to appeal.

* * * * * * *

All day I felt the pulse of the people, quickening, quickening--an added five beats to every hour--with wonder, rage, and, at last, terror maniacal. Paris was threatened; hard-wrung freedom was tottering to its fall.

This Paris was a vessel of wrath on treacherous waters--manned by revolted slaves; the crew under hatches; encompassed by enemies on every side. What remained but to clear the decks for action,--every hero to his post at the vast bulwarks; every son-of-a-sea-cook to remain and poniard the prisoners lest they club their manacles and take their captors in the rear!

At two o’clock the tocsin pealed--the signal to prepare for the fray. From its first blaring stroke I ceased, it seemed, to be myself. I waived my individuality, and became as much a conscript of the rising tide of passion as a high-perched stone that the wave at last reaches and drags down with the shingle becomes a condition of the general uproar. I made, indeed, no subscription to this fanatical heat of emotion; I was simply involved in it--to go with it, and perish of it, perhaps, but never to succumb to its disordered sophistries or yield my free soul to its influence. Possibly I had a wild idea, in the midst of sinister forebodings, that a few such as I, scattered here and there, might leaven the ugly mass. But I do not know. Hemmed in by wrath and terror, thought casts its buoys and sinks into very fathomless depths.

From the Place de Grève, along Pelletier Quay; across the Ponts au Change and St Michel; westwards by the Rue St André des Arcs, where a little diversion was caused by a street-singer at whom the crowd took offence, in that he, being an insignificant buffoon, did pelt it with its classic pretentiousness, wagging his coat-tails in contempt thereof (“À bas, Pitou!” they shrieked; “we will dock thee of thy sting and put thee to buzz in a stone bottle!”--and they had him unfrocked in a twinkling and hoisted for punishment); round, with a curve to the south, into the Rue de Bussi; thence, again westwards, along the street of St Marguerite; finally, weathering the sinister cape of the Abbaye St Germain, northwards into the Rue St Benoit and up to the yard entrance of the very prison itself,--such was the long course by which I was borne, in the midst of clamour, hate, and revilings, some dreadful early scenes in the panorama of the Revolution unfolded before my eyes--scenes crudely limned by crude street artists, splashed and boltered with crimson, horrible for the ghastly applause they evoked.

I saw and I was helpless--the block about the carriages of the nonjurants--the desperate stroke at the _sans-culotte_ that cut the knot of indecision--the crashing panels, the flying and flung priests. One damnable with a sabre split a bald head, that came wavering in my direction, like a melon, and the brains flew like its seeds. I shut my eyes and thought, Mercy is in right ratio with the hardness of the blow. Strike deep, poor guttersnipes, if you must strike at all!

Then began the “severe justice of the people.”

* * * * * * *

What was I, poor philosophic _misérable_, but a germ of those germs in that great artery of blood that the revolted system was endeavouring to expel. I saw numbers of my kind thrown forth and mangled in the midst of horrors unspeakable; I was borne helpless to the heart, and was rejected to fly shuddering to remote veins of the prison’s circulation, only to return by an irresistible attraction to the central terror. More than once my mad expostulations brought me into perilous notice.

“You have hard wrongs to avenge!” I shrieked; “but at least the form of pleading has been granted you!”

“And these!” cried the killers. “Blood of God! is not Bastille Maillard within there checking the tally of the accursed? Aristocrat art thou!”

They bounded from me to a fresh victim thrust that moment from the door. She came dazed into the flare of the torches--a white face with umber hair tumbled all about it. Two gloating hounds took her under the arm-pits; a third----

_Ciel! pour tant de rigueur, de quoi suis-je coupable?_

* * * * * * *

I do not know whither my wanderings tended, or what space of time was covered by them. Sooner or later I was always back at the Abbaye, glutting my soul with assurance of its own wreck, helpless, despite my loathing of it, to resist the attraction. What horror absorbs the moth as it circles round the flame, I thought in those recurrent moments I could understand.

Once, when I returned, an unwonted silence reigned about the place. A few vampire figures, restless, phantasmal, flitted hither and thither in the neighbourhood of the reeking shambles. But the slaughterers and the red ladies of St Michel were retired, during an interval in the examination, for refreshment. I heard the shrill buzz of their voices all down the Rue St Benoit and from the wine and lemonade shops opposite the very gates by which I stood.

I looked into the fearful yard. My God! the dead, it seemed, were phosphorescent with the rottenness of an ancient system! Here, there, on all sides they broke the darkness with blots of light like hideous glow-worms--their hundred white faces the reflectors of as many lamps.

“But it is a brave illumination!” gurgled a voice at my ear.

I glanced aside in loathing. A little old woman, whose lungs barked at every breath, stood near me. She laughed as if she would shake herself into touchwood.

“A brave illumination!” she wheezed--“the inspiration of the girl La Lune. She was dedicated to the Holy Mother; and her skirt! Oh, _mon Dieu_! but it was of the azure of heaven, and now it is purple as a strangled face; and it slaps on her ankles. But by-and-by she must seek purification, for she is dedicated to the holy Virgin.”

“She placed these lamps?”

“She led her sisters to the committee that sits there.” (She pointed a gnarled finger. To one side of the dreadful quadrangle a dull glow came melancholy through some tall windows.) “She complained that ladies who would fain enjoy the show were prevented by the darkness. Then to each dead aristocrat they put a lamp. That was a fine courtesy. It is not often one sees such goods brought to market.”

A wild cloud of shapes came rushing upon us with brandished weapons and a demon skirl of voices. I thought at first that I must be the object of their fury; but they passed us by, cursing and gesticulating, and drove something amongst them up the yard, and stopped and made a ring about it on the bloody stones. What was it? I had a glimpse of two petrified faces as the little mob swept by, and a queer constriction seized my heart. Then, all in a moment, I was following, crying in my soul that here was something tangible for my abased humanity to lay hold of--some excuse to indulge a passion of self-sacrifice--some claim to a lump of ice at my feet and a lamp at my head. The dead were so calm, the living so besotted. A miserly theft, I thought, to take another’s blood when one’s own gluts one’s arteries to suffocation.

I looked over the shoulders of the outermost of the group. What horrible cantrip of Fortune had consigned this old barren weed of a man, this white exotic of a girl, to a merciless handling by these demons? The two were in walking dress, and not in the _déshabille_ of prisoners. There was a lull in the systematic progress of the butchery. Here, it would seem, was an _entr’acte_ designed only to relieve the tedium of waiting.

A half-dozen harpies held the girl. There was a stain of red on her ripe young lip, for I think one of the beasts had struck her; but her face was stubborn with pride. In front of all the old wizened man, who had been released, ran to and fro in an agony of obsequious terror.

“Yes, yes,” he quavered, “’tis a luminous sight--an admirable show! They lie like the fallen sticks of rockets, glimmering a dying spark. Is it not so, Carinne? Little cabbage, is it not so?”

He implored her with his feverish eyes.

“They are martyrs!” cried the girl; “and you are a coward!”

“No, no!” he wailed, and wrung his hands; and “My God! she will murder me!” he shrieked.

Suddenly he saw, darted through the ring of ruffians, and caught the breast of my coat with both his hands.

“Monsieur! you have nobility in your face! Tell these good souls that I am a furious patriot and a good citizen. Monsieur, Monsieur! We walk abroad--we are involved, unwitting, in the _mêlée_. The girl denounces all for pigs and murderers, and, naturally, those who hear take umbrage and force us hither.”

His dry lips vibrated; he danced up and down like a gnat on a window-pane. All the time the women were volubly chattering and the men cursing and pulling. They desired, it seemed, a prologue to the second act of the tragedy; and that was bad art. But then they were as drunk as one could wish.

“Thou art nice and dainty, _citoyenne_!” they shrieked. “See here--thou shalt be _vivandière_ to the brave army of avengers! Tap her an aristocrat heart and fill her a canteen that all may drink!”

The beastly proposal was not too gross for the occasion. A man lurched forward with a jeering oath, and I--I sprang to the front too, and took the hound by his gulping throat. There came a great noise about me; I did not relax my hold, and some one rushed into our midst.

“What do you here!” he cried, harshly (Casimir’s voice). “Death of God! have you orders to insult and threaten peaceable citizens who walk abroad to see the illuminations?”

With a fierce sweep of his arms he cleared all away in front of him. The act--the gesture, brought him to my side.

“Go--escape!” he whispered, frantically. “This, here, I will attend to.”

“You knew, then?” I gasped out; and he fell back from me.

But I released my hold and stood panting. I was at the moment no whit in love with life, but I dreaded by the least stubbornness to precipitate the catastrophe that threatened that half-fainting girl. Her Casimir gave his arm to in a peremptory manner. She clung to him, and he led her stumbling across the yard, the little whimpering pinch-fist scuttling in their wake. The mob spat curses after them, but--this _intermezzo_ being no part of its programme--it respected the Deputy’s insignia of office so far as to allow him his perquisite.

Then, with a howl of fury, it turned upon me--

“Accursed! thou dost well to dispute the people’s will!”

“See his fine monseigneur hands, washed white in a bath of milk, while the peasants drank rotten water!”

“He will think to cow us with a look. He cannot disabuse himself of the tradition. Down with the dog of an aristocrat!”

“But if he is Brunswick’s courier--Brunswick that would dine in Paris on the boiling hearts of patriots!”

I was backing slowly towards the gate as they followed reviling me. What would you? I could not help others; I would take my own destinies in hand. Here, in deadly personal peril, I felt my feet on the good earth once more, and found restoration of my reason in a violence of action. There was no assistance possible. Paris this night was a menagerie, in which all beasts of prey and of burden were released from restraint to resolve for themselves the question of survival.

In a moment I turned and fled, and half-a-dozen came screaming after me. I gained the gate in advance, and sped down the Rue St Benoit. One man, lurching from a wineshop, cut at me aimlessly with a notched and bloody sabre; but I evaded him with ease, and he fell into the midst of the pursuers, retarding them a little. I reached the south-west angle of the prison, where the _Place_ split up, like the blown corner of a flag, into many little crooked ribbons of streets, and amongst these I dived, racing haphazard, while the red-socks thudded in my wake and my heart in my ribs. Suddenly, turning a corner, I saw the narrow mouth of an alley gape to my left. Into it I went, like a touched worm into its hole, and, swallowed by the blackness, stood still. The feet pounded by; but, sooner or later, I knew the dogs must nose back to pick up the lost scent. Then they would have me nicely in a little _cul de sac_, like a badger in a tub.

I leaned my shoulder--to the wall, as I thought; but the wall gave to my pressure, and I stumbled and went through it with a sliding run, while something flapped to, grievously scoring my shins in its passing. I was on my feet in an instant, however, and then I saw that I had broken, by way of a swing-door, into a little dusty lobby, to one side of which was a wicket and pay-place, and thence a flight of wooden stairs ran aloft to some chamber from which flowed down a feeble radiance of light.

I pushed through the wicket (not a soul was in the place, it seemed) and went softly and rapidly up the stairs. At the top I came upon a sight that at first astounded, then inspired me.

I was in one of those _salles de spectacle_ that were at that time as numerous in Paris as were political clubs--a wide, low room, with an open platform at its further end for musicians, and, round three of its walls, a roped-in enclosure for figures in waxwork. It was these bowelless dolls that caused me my start, and in which I immediately saw my one little chance of salvation.

I went down the row gingerly, on tiptoe. A horn lantern, slung over the stair-head, was the only light vouchsafed this thronged assembly of dummies. Its rays danced weakly in corners, and lent some of the waxen faces a spurious life. A ticket was before each effigy--generally, as I hurriedly gathered, a quite indispensable adjunct. I had my desperate plan; but perhaps I was too particular to select my complete double. Here, a button or the cut of a collar were the pregnant conditions of history. The clothes made the man, and Mirabeau had written ‘Le Tartufe’ on the strength of a flowing wig. I saw Necker personating our unhappy monarch in that fatal Phrygian cap that was like the glowing peak of a volcano; stuttering Desmoulins waving a painted twig, his lips inappropriately inseparable; the English Pitt, with a nose blown to a point; Voltaire; Rousseau; Beaumarchais--many of the notabilities and notorieties of our own times--and before the last I stopped suddenly.

I would not for the world insult the author of ‘Figaro’; but it was my distinction to be without any; and in a waxwork the ticket makes the man.

Pierre Augustin was represented pointing a Republican moral--in dress a _pseudo petit-maître_--at his feet a broken watch. One recalls the incident--at Versailles--when a grand seigneur requests the ex-horologist to correct his timepiece for him. “Monsieur, my hand shakes.” “_Laissez donc, monsieur!_ you belittle your professional skill.” Beaumarchais flings the watch on the floor. “_Voilà, monsieur!_ it is as I said!”

Now I saw my hope in this figure and (it was all a matter of moments with me) whipped it up in my arms and ran with it to the end of the platform. A flounce of baize hung therefrom to the floor, and into the hollow revealed by the lifting of this I shot the invertebrate dummy, and then scuttled back to the ropes to take its place.

There were sounds as I did so--a noise below that petrified me in the position I assumed. My heart seemed to burr like the winding-wheel of a mechanical doll. I pray M. Beaumarchais to forgive me that travesty of a dignified reproof.

A step--that of a single individual--came bounding up the stair. My face was turned in its direction. I tried to look and yet keep my eyes fixed. The dull flapping light seconded my dissemblance; but the occasion braced me like a tonic, and I was determined to strike, if need were, with all the force of the pugnacious wit I represented.

Suddenly I saw a white, fearful countenance come over the stair-head--shoulders, legs, a complete form. It was that of an ugly stunted man of fifty, whose knees shook, whose cheeks quivered like a blanc-mange. He ran hither and thither, sobbing and muttering to himself.

“Quick, quick! who?--Mirabeau? A brave thought, a magnificent thought! My God!--will they fathom it? I have his brow--his scornful air of insistence. My God, my God!--that I should sink to be one of my own puppets!”

Astounded, I realised the truth. This poltroon--the very proprietor of the show--was in my own actual case, and had hit upon a like way out of his predicament. I saw him seize and trundle the ridiculous presentment of M. Mirabeau to the room end, and then fling it hurriedly down and kick it--the insolent jackass!--under the curtain. I saw him run back and pose himself--with a fatuous vanity even in his terror--as that massive autocrat of the Assembly; and then, with a clap and a roar, I heard at last the hounds of pursuit break covert below and come yelling up the stairs.

I do not think I shook; yet it seemed impossible that they could pass me by. There were one or two amongst them I thought I recognised as Carinne’s captors; but they were all hideous, frantic shapes, elf-locked, malodorous, bestial and drunk with blood. They uttered discordant cries as they came scrambling into the room; and by a flickering at the nape of his neck I could see that my fellow-sufferer was unable to control the throaty rising of his agitation. Suddenly a horrible silence befell. One of the intruders, a powerful young ruffian of a malignant jesting humour, put his comrades back and silenced them with an arm. His bloodshot eyes were fascinating poor Mirabeau; slowly he raised a finger and pointed it at the creature. The bubbles seemed to fly up the latter’s neck as if his heart were turned into water. It was a terrible moment--then, all at once, the whole room echoed with demon laughter.

“Mother of Christ! what cunning!”

“But, my God! he is a fine libel on the king of patriots!”

“See! the works have not run down. He twitches yet from his last performance!”

“He makes himself a show to the people. He shall be given a lamp in the yard of the Abbaye.”

The figure fell upon its knees with a choking shriek.

“Messieurs! I acted upon my first instinct of preservation! I had no thought, I swear it, to insult the great or to question the majesty of the people. Messieurs, I detest aristocrats and applaud your method of dealing with them. _Merci! merci!_ I am a poor exhibitor of waxworks; an excellent patriot and a servant of the public.”

“But that is true!” cried a voice from the stairs. “This is little Tic-tac, that helped to decorate the Capet’s chariot on the day of the Hôtel de Ville.”

The mob grunted over this advocate.

“But he helped a prisoner to escape.”

(Was there another, then, in the same plight as myself?)

“Messieurs! he asked the way of me, as any stranger might!”

“_Malepeste!_ if thou tell’st us so! But thou hast dared to personate a God!”

“Messieurs, he lent his countenance to me, as ever to the unfortunate.”

The answer raised a roar of approbation.

“_Comme il est fin!_ take thy goose-skin! and yet we must tax thee somehow.”

“Let us destroy this show that he has profaned!”

My heart seemed to shrink into itself. I suffered--I suffered; but fortunately for a few moments only.

With the words on his lips, the fellow that had spoken slashed with his sabre, over the kneeling showman’s head, amongst the staring effigies. The whistle of his weapon made me blink. What did it matter?--the end must come now.

It was not as I foresaw. The waxen head spun into the air--the figure toppled against that standing next to it--that against its neighbour--its neighbour against me. I saw what was my cue, and went down in my turn, stiffly, with a dusty flop, twisting to my side as I fell, and hoping that he whom I was bowling over in due order was rich in padding. Nevertheless I was horribly bruised.

There was a howl of laughter.

“_Mor’ Dieu!_ but five at a blow!” cried the executioner. “This is better than the one to fifty yonder!” and he came running to read the names of those he had overturned.

“Necker! it is right that he should be pictured fallen. Pitt--Beaumarchais! ha, ha, little toad! where are those patriot muskets? in your breeches-pocket? but I will cut them out!”

Now I gave up all for lost. He stepped back to get his distance--there came a crash by the stairway, and the room was plunged in darkness. One of the mob had swung up his weapon over a figure, and had knocked out the lantern with a back-handed blow.

It is the little incidents of life that are prolific as insects. The situation resolved itself into clamour and laughter and a boisterous groping of the company down the black stairway. In a minute the place was silent and deserted.

I lay still, as yet awaiting developments. I could not forget that M. Tic-tac, as a pronounced patriot, might not honour my confidence. For my escape, it must have been as I supposed. Another victim, eluding the murderers, had drawn them off my scent, and the showman had effected yet a second cross-current. He was indeed fortunate to have kept a whole skin.

Presently I heard him softly stirring and moaning to himself.

“_Misérable!_ to have dishonoured my _rôle_! Would _he_ have succumbed thus to an accident? But I am like him--yes, I am like him, for all they may say.”

Their mockery was the wormwood in his cup. He dragged himself to his feet by-and-by, and felt his way across the room to recover his abused idol. Then I would delay no longer. I rose, stepped rapidly to the stair-head, and descended to the street. He heard me--as I knew by the terrified cessation of his breathing,--and thought me, perhaps, a laggard member of his late company. Anyhow he neither moved nor spoke.

The killers were at their work again. The agonised yells of the victims followed and maddened me. But I was secure from further pursuit, save by the dogs of conscious helplessness.

And one of these kept barking at my heel: “Carinne, that you were impotent to defend! What has become of the child?”

Chapter II. Citoyenne Carinne.

It was my unhappiness in the black spring-time of the “Terror” to see my old light acquaintance, the Abbé Michau, jogging on his way to the Place de la Bastille. I pitied him greatly. He had pursued Pleasure so fruitlessly all his days; and into this fatal quagmire had the elusive flame at length conducted him. He sat on the rail of the tumbril--a depressed, puzzled look on his face--between innocence and depravity. Both were going the same road as himself--the harmless white girl and the besotted priest, who shrunk in terror from giving her the absolution she asked;--and poor Charles divided them.

He was not ever of Fortune’s favourites. He would make too fine an art of Epicurism, and he sinned so by rule as to be almost virtuous. I remember him with a half-dozen little axioms of his own concocting, that were after all only morality misapplied: “To know how to forget oneself is to be graduate in the school of pleasure.” “Self-consciousness is always a wasp in the peach.” “The art of enjoyment is the art of selection.” On such as these he founded his creed of conduct; and that procured him nothing but a barren series of disappointments. He was never successful but in extricating himself from mishaps. The _ravissantes_ he sighed after played with and insulted him--though they could never debase his spirit. The dishes he designed lacked the last little secret of perfection. He abhorred untidiness, yet it was a condition of his existence; and he could not carry off any situation without looking like a thief. One further turn of the wheel, and he would have been a saint in a monastery.

I can recall him with some tenderness, and his confident maxims with amusement. That “art of selection” of his I found never so applicable as to the choice of one’s Revolutionary landlord. It was Michau’s _logeur_, I understand, who caused the poor Abbé to be arrested and brought before the tribunal miscalled of Liberty, where the advocacy of the chivalrous Chauveau de la Garde was sufficient only to procure him the last grace of an unproductive appeal. It was the atrocity with whom latterly I lodged who brought me to _my_ final pass.

In truth, as the letters of apartments were largely recruited from the _valetaille_ of _émigrés_, the need of caution in choosing amongst them was very real. M. le Marquis could not take flight in a panic without scattering some of his fine feathers--fortunately, indeed, for him sometimes, for they were as sops thrown to the pursuing wolves while he sped on. Then, down would grovel public accusers, police, and committee-men to snap at the fragments; and amongst them Bon-Jean, Monsieur’s _valet de pied_, would secure his share, perhaps, and set up house with it in one of the meaner faubourgs, and trade profitably therein upon the fears of his lodgers.

Simon Mignard was the last who had the honour to entertain me; and to that horrible little grotesque did I owe my subsequent lodgment in La Petite Force. It was a bad choice, and, with my experience, an unpardonable; but I was taken with a certain humour in the creature that put me off my judgment.

For generally, indeed, this faculty of humour I found to be antipathetic to revolution. It was to be looked upon as a mark of social degeneration. The brute “thrown back” to his primordial state is an animal that takes himself with the most laughterless gravity. He resumes himself corrupt, so to speak, as one resumes the endurance of office full of the rebellious grievance of a holiday. He returns to the primary indulgence of instinct with a debased appetite, and that sense of humour does not accompany him. This is why his prejudices have the force of convictions.

“Citizen Simon,” I said one day, “I would put it to you--if revolutionists would reconstitute society by purging the world of the abnormal, should they not offer themselves the first holocausts to their theories?”

“Hey?” he cried, peering over his glasses. His eye-slits were like half-healed wounds; his face was all covered with a grey down, as if he were some old vessel of wrath the Revolution had produced from its mustiest blood-bin in the cellars where its passions were formerly wont to ferment.

“Hey?” he cried. “But explain, Citizen Thibaut.”

“Why, obviously a primal simplicity cannot be taught by those who, by their own showing, are an essential condition of degeneration.”

“You think so, my friend? But is it not he who has hunted with the wolves can best advise the lamb whither not to stray? Set a thief to catch a thief, but not innocence to lead innocence.”

“We are all so disinterested, eh? We must kill to purify--so long as _we_ remain the executioners.”

“The physicians! the physicians! Some day we shall provide the tonic.”

“At this rate the physicians will have to drink it themselves.”

“Meaning the patients will fail us? Rest content. They will last our time. The ills in the constitution of France are many. For the resurrection--_sang Dieu_!” he cried, with a wry face, “but that is no part of _our_ programme!”

Indeed, it was not of his. He was actuated by no passion but the blood-sucker’s. One day he showed me a clumsy model guillotine, a foot high, of his own contriving. The axe was a fragment of table-knife sunk in a finger of lead, and with it he would operate upon a gruesome little doll he had with an adjustable neck. Snip! the blade fell and the head, and a spout of crimson gushed forth and stained the floor.

“That is a waste of good wine,” said I.

His face puckered like a toad’s eyelids.

“Is it not?” he chuckled, “of the brand drunk by the patriot Citoyenne Sombreuil.”

“Blood!”

“_Voyez!_” he cried, with a little shriek of laughter. “It is hollow. Often I fill it from the tap in the Place de la Bastille. My faith, what a fountain! I love it like Dantzic brandy.”

Then it was I found his humour a little excessive to my taste; and I severed my connection with him. He might lie; obviously he did, in fact, about the blood; but one’s sympathies could not embrace so stupid a falsehood. Promptly he denounced me to his section. I had given him the courteous “you,” said he, and amongst my effects was a box of the interdicted hair-powder.

But it is of my earlier landlord, Jacques Crépin, who for a time influenced my fortunes quite admirably, that I desire here to speak.

Upon this rascal I happened on the evening of Lepelletier St Fargeau’s murder in Février’s Coffee-house. It was the interminable week of the votings on the king’s sentence. During the course of it I had many times visited the Hall of Convention, had stayed a while to watch the slow chain of Deputies hitching over the Tribune, with their dreary chant, “La Mort,” that was like the response to an endless litany of fatality intoned by the ushers; had heard the future Dictator, spectacled, marmoset-faced, irrepressible in oratory, drone his sour dithyrambics where a word would have sufficed; had fallen half asleep over the phantom scene, and had imagined myself at the Comédie Française during a performance of “Les Victimes Cloîtrées”--a dreamy fancy to which the incessant sound of feet on boards, high up in the “Mountain” quarter, the reverberating clap of doors, the wide patter of voices and tinkle of laughter from bedizened _chères amies_, pricking down the _ayes_ and _noes_ upon scented cards, the shriller brabble of Mère Duchesse aloft with her priestesses of the Salpêtrière, and the intermittent melodramatic drawl of the actors moving across the stage, gave colour and coherence.

By then, I think, I was come to be graduate in Michau’s school of Pleasure. It was impressed upon me that to think of myself was a little to foretaste my probable martyrdom. It was philosophy more congenial to read in the serene patriot Thibaut a disinterested sheep fattening on the grass about the _abattoir_. My title was a plague-spot to cover; little but the dust of my patrimony remained; I had long disabused my mind of the dogma that manliness is necessarily a triumphant force in the world.

Yet, a month before, I had been conscious of a little run of pity, that was like a sloughing of the old wound of nobility. It was to see the figure of him I had called Sire heavily seated in that same _Salle de Manège_, his attire, appropriately, a drab surtout--the colour of new-turned mould--his powdered hair blotted with a tonsure where he had leaned his weary head back for rest, that lost look on his ineffectual face--“Messieurs! this strange indignity! But doubtless the saints will explain to me of what I am accused.”

Bah! have I not learned the “Rights of Man,” and seen them illustrated, too, on those days of the “severe justice of the people.” The worse the decomposition below, the thicker will be the scum that rises to the top. But there the wholesome air shall deodorise it by-and-by, and the waters of life be sweet to the taste again--for a time. And in the meanwhile I browse by the _abattoir_.

On that Saturday evening, the last of the voting, I dined with distinction at Février’s in the Palais Royal. I could still afford, morally and materially, this little practice of self-indulgence; for they had not yet begun to make bread of dried pease, and many of the ardent Deputies themselves were admirable connoisseurs in meat and wine.

While I was sitting--the whole place being in a ferment of scurry and babble--a couple, who awakened my curious interest, entered and took a vacant table next to mine. A withered old man it was and a young girl, who sauntered with ample grace in his wake.

The first came down the room, prying hither and thither, bowelless and bent like a note of interrogation. He was buttoned up to the throat in a lank dark-green surtout, and his plain hat was tilted back from his forehead, so as to show his eyebrows, each lifted and lost in the creases of a dozen arched wrinkles, and the papery lids beneath them bulging and half closed. His face was all run into grey sharpness, but a conciliatory smile was a habit of his lips. He carried his hands behind his back as if they were manacled there.

The girl who followed was in features and complexion cold and beautiful. Her eyes were stone-grey under well-marked brows; her forehead rounded from her nose like a kitten’s; the curls that escaped from beneath her furred hood were of a rich walnut brown. She had that colourless serenity in her face that is like snow over perfumed flowers. Gazing on such, one longs to set one’s heart to the chill and melt it and see the blossoms break.

Now I had at once recognised in this couple the sustainers of the principal _rôles_ in a certain September tragedy _entr’acte_. In these times of feverish movement the manner in which Casimir had secured their escape was indeed an old story with me; yet, seeing them again under these vastly improved circumstances, and remembering in what way I had sought to assist them, my heart was moved beyond its present custom to a feeling of sympathetic comradeship with one, at least, of the two.

The old man chose his table.

“Sit down, wench,” said he. “My faith! we must dine, though crowns fall.”

She took her seat with a little peevish sigh.

“Though the stars fell in the street like hail, you would dine,” she said.

He cocked his head sideways.

“They have fallen, my Carinne. The ruin of them litters the Temple.”

She said doggedly, “_Vive le roi!_” under her breath.

“My God!” he whispered, and called the waiter.

He eyed her askance and nervously as the man came. Some distraught admiration seemed to mingle with his apprehension of her. She sat languid and indifferent, and even closed her eyes, with a little disdainful smile, as he leaned down to her and ran his finger eagerly over the various items of the bill of fare.

“Ostend oysters, carp fried in milk, sweetbread patty--that is good. Ragout of the kidneys and combs of cocks--that is very good--Carinne, see! the ragout! Holy saints, but my pocket! Slice of calf’s head, turtle fashion--girl, are you listening? Be reckless. Take of all if you will. I bid thee--thy little uncle, _ma mie_. Slice of--Carinne, this is better than the cabbages and fried eggs of _Pierrettes_. I will not care--I will not. Though I have to cut down trees to meet it, the palate shall have its holiday. Slice of--_mon Dieu_, Carinne! I ate of it once before in this very house. It melts like the manna of the Israelites. It does not surfeit, but it forms an easy bed for the repose of ecstasies more acute.”

The girl broke in with a little high-flung laugh.

“Not trees, but a forest,” she said. “There--choose for me. I am indifferent.”

“Indifferent! indifferent?--Oh, undeserving of the fine gifts of the gods!”

He turned to the waiter, his eyes still devouring the _carte_, his lips silently busy with its contents. Presently he gave his order, sat down, and remained fixedly gnawing a finger, his face set half in enjoying contemplation, half in a baffled aggravation of selection.

In only one other direction did the couple appear to arouse curiosity. The great nerve of the town was all charged with a leaping electricity, and citizens, staid enough ordinarily, ate now and drank under an excitement they could barely control.

But, over against me, at a little distance, were two men seated at a table; and of these one seemed to take a like interest with mine in my neighbours.

This individual, unmoved, apparently, by the general ferment, had finished his dinner and sat sipping his Médoc luxuriously. He was a pimple-faced man, well-nourished and sensual-looking, but with an air of tolerant geniality about him. Ugly as Danton, he had yet a single redeeming ornament in the shape of a quantity of rich auburn hair that fell from his head in natural curls. Though his condition was plain to me, and I saw that the restaurateur treated him with obsequious deference, he appeared more self-complacent than self-sufficient, and as if he were rather accustomed to indulge than abuse his position. For I recognised in him the president of some sectional committee, and that by the little plaque, printed small with the Rights of Man, that hung as a pendant from his tricolour neck-ribbon.

Of the other at the table I took but little notice, save to remark that he devoured his meal with the air of a man to whom good digestion is no essential condition of politics.

Now, of a sudden, Jacques Crépin of the pendant lowered his legs, took up his bottle and glass, and, to my extreme surprise, crossed the room to my table and sat down by me.

He did not speak at first, being engaged in watching our neighbours, before whom were placed at the moment the dishes of the uncle’s selection.

Mademoiselle Carinne gave a little _Ouf!_ over hers.

“But what is this?” she said.

“It is a pig’s foot _à la_ St Menehould. Such a dish, _babouine_!”

The old rascal had taken advantage of her insensibility to procure her one of the cheapest entries on the list.

She pushed it from her with an exclamation of disgust.

“Fie, then!” she cried. “The very hoof of a filthy swine! Wouldst thou have me make my hunger a footstool to a pig? Take it away. I will not touch it!”

He protested, voluble and shamefaced. She would not listen. Out of mere wilfulness she now selected the most expensive item of the _menu_--a partridge stewed in wine. He seemed like to cry; but she persisted and gained her point.

“We shall be ruined!” he cried, inconsistently enough. “For a month after our return we shall have to live on bread and boiled nettles.”

“In December, _mon oncle_? Then I am imperious for white wine of Mont Raché.”

The old fellow almost shrieked.

“Carinne! Eight francs the bottle! Consider, my niece. I shall die in Sainte Pélagie!”

The new-comer turned to me with a grin.

“Didst ever hear the like?” said he.

I nodded gravely. I was not then all inured to impertinence.

“He lacks the art of selection,” I said coldly, thinking of Michau.

He showed himself good-humouredly conscious of my manner. He leaned towards me and murmured carelessly--

“There, of a truth, speaks Monseigneur le Comte de la Muette.”

I reached for my glass and sipped from it; but I have no doubt my hand shook.

“The citizen does not recognise me?”

“No, by my faith.”

“I am Jacques Crépin; and formerly I served where I now dine.”

I glanced at him. Some faint remembrance of the fellow woke in me.

“M. le Comte,” he went on, in the same low voice, “once rewarded me with a handsome vail for some trifling service. It was the lucky louis-d’or of my fortunes. Here was a little of the means; the Revolution was my opportunity. Now the masters serve the waiters. I devour with my teeth what I once devoured with my eyes. You see me president of a section; but, _pardieu_! I have no quarrel with aristocrats of a fastidious palate. It was the contemplation of such educated me to a right humour in gastronomy. I am indebted to monsieur for many a delicate hint in selection.”

Again I thought of the poor Michau.

“I am honoured,” I said. “And so, M. Crépin, this is the goal of your high republicanism?”

“My faith!” he said, with a generous chuckle, “I acknowledge it. I have existed forty years that I may live one--perhaps no more. To drink and to eat and to love _en prince_--I have the capacity for it and the will. I have nursed my constitution on broken scraps. This _fesse-Mathieu_ here offends me. Had I a fortune, I would fling it away on a single desired dish if necessary. We have waived the right to think of the morrow. But, how is monsieur known?”

“They call me Citizen Thibaut.”

“Citizen Thibaut, I drink to our better acquaintance. This Médoc--I have not grudged it you in former years. Your refined appreciation of it has many a time glorified to me my supper of stale fragments. But for you, maybe, I had not learned the secret of its fragrance. To my past master in epicurism I gulp a grateful toast.”

He was as good as his word.

“Citizen Crépin,” I said, “where do you live?”

“Rue de Jouy, St Antoine,” he answered.

“I seek a convenient landlord. Will you accommodate me?”

“With all my heart.”

I heard the _vieillard_ at the next table gobble and choke. I turned my head to look, sprang to my feet, and my glass crashed on the boards.

In that instant the room had leaped into uproar--for something immediate, swift, and terrible had happened. It was this:

The fast-eating man at the table opposite, having finished his dinner, was risen to pay his bill. He stood with impatient hand outstretched as Février fumbled in his pocket for the change; and at the moment a fellow, thick-set, stubble-bearded, dressed in a blouse and faded cloak, strode up the room and paused by him.

“Are you Deputy Lepelletier?” said he.

The diner turned and nodded.

“You have voted in this affair of the king?”

“_Mais oui_,” said the other--“for death.”

“_Scélérat--prends ca!_” and with the word he whipped a long blade from under his cloak and passed it into the body of the deputy. I saw the flash and heard the piteous bleat, as also, I swear, the sound of the flesh sucking to the steel.

Février snatched at the murderer, and was spun to the floor like a skittle. I saw startled figures rise, chairs and tables totter, and the one bounding amongst them. He got clear away.

Then, as the mob closed about the fallen, moaning shape, I turned with an instinct of horror to view of my neighbours.

The old gourmet had flung himself back in his chair, his face twisted from the sight; but mademoiselle still picked daintily at her partridge.

Chapter III. The Footpad.

Early in June of the year ’93 I left Paris in company with M. Crépin. At that time in the flower of his, somewhat mediocre, fortunes, he had been intrusted with a mission which was entirely after his own heart. He was to represent the Executive, in fact, in a “sequestrating” tour through Limosin and Guienne,--or rather through the new-found departments that had deposed those ancient territories,--and his interest had procured me a post as his clerk or assistant. What duties this embraced perhaps the Government would have found it as difficult to specify as their sub-agent; but, after all, Jacques Bonhomme emancipated was excessively conservative in the matter of his retention of the system of complimentary sinecures. For myself, I looked upon my appointment as the simple means to postpone an inevitable denunciation.

Crépin and I had by then ceased to fraternise. I could never quite learn to adapt my sympathies to a certain _mauvais ton_ that underlay in him all the sensitiveness of the voluptuary. Also, perhaps, I was beginning a little to resent the humourless methods of a destiny that had not the wit, it seemed, to rebuke my innate luxuriousness but by affecting a concern to accommodate me with house-fellows of my own kidney. We parted on the best of terms; and he none the less attended to my interests and, as far as possible, to my safety. To the end, I think, he retained an admiration for the superior quality of my epigastrium; and when his opportunity came to do me a service, he never failed to remind me of his indebtedness to my fastidious _gourmandise_.

We left the city, travelling _en roi_, on a fine blowing afternoon. We had our roomy carriage, with four well-blooded horses, and a postilion to each pair. An escort of four patriots, moreover, mounted, armed, and generally drunk, accompanied us to enforce the letter of the law. We went out by the suburb of Passy, starting from the Pavillon-Liberté, close by the Thuilleries,--where Crépin received his papers of administration--and whipping along the river-bank by way of the Port aux Pierres. Close by the gates the carriage gave a thudding jolt, and drew up suddenly to an accompaniment of noise like the screaming of a swollen axle.

I started up in my corner.

“What is it?” I exclaimed; but three men, risen at that moment from a bench under some chestnut-trees, engaged my surprised attention. They made at the postilions, it seemed, and the face of him that was foremost twitched with a rage of nervous resentment. Their hats had been laid beside them in the shade, and I noticed that as this individual sprang to his feet, the powder leapt from his head as if a musket-ball had struck it. For he was very sprucely groomed, every hair currycombed to run parallel with its fellows; and there was a fastidious neatness about his appearance that was like the peevish delicacy of an invalid.

Such, indeed, he was, from more than one point of view; for he was no other than M. Robespierre himself, dressed in the fine blue coat he was studying to make historical, and exhibiting the weak extremes of his nature in presence of a run-over dog.

“But this is infamous!” I heard him shrill, in a strained wavering voice. “Thus to shock our humanity and our nerves!”

He ran to the carriage window in uncontrollable excitement. He bustled with his shaking speech so that it was hardly audible.

“What mischief produces itself that you tear through the streets like brigands? Messieurs--messieurs! but I say you have no right--citizens, do you hear?”

Crépin, dismayed, muttered something about authority. The other snapped at the word and worried it.

“Authority! there is none in this city to be careless of innocent lives. Authority! who excuses himself to me--to the Republic--by assuming a licence to murder under its ægis,--yes, murder, I say? You would adopt the prerogatives of aristocrats--you are an aristocrat--Tachereau! St Just!”

He was beside himself. His lean hands picked at the window-frame. All the time the poor cur in the road was screeching, and the sound seemed to jar him out of his self-control. One of his companions stepped up to him, put a hand upon his arm, and drew him away. Quite a little mob had gathered about us.

“_Reculez les chevaux!_” said this person to the postilions. “Complete what you have begun.”

The horses backed the carriage once, and drew forward again, stilling the cries. Personally I should have preferred alighting during the operation. Robespierre ran to the trees and put his palms to his ears, doubling himself up as if he had the toothache. The other came to the window once more.

This was the “Apocalyptic!” of the Assembly, its most admirable type of fanaticism. Dark and immovable as a Nubian archer in a wall painting, he might have been represented for ever holding the taut string and the arrow that should whistle to its mark. He was young, a mere boy--melancholy, olive-skinned, beautiful in his way. Cold, incorruptible, merciless, nevertheless, he--this St Just--was yet that one of the ultra-revolutionists I could find it in me to regard admiringly. Of all, he alone acted up to the last letter of his creed of purification. Of all, he alone was willing to do a long life’s reaping without wage, without even that posthumous consideration of a niche in the “Pantheon of history.” Like the figure of Time on a clock, he was part and parcel of the scythe with which he wrought. He must move when the hour came--cutting right and left--and with the last stroke of inspiration he must stop until the wheels of being should bring him to the front once more. Truly, he was not great, but, quite possibly, necessary; and as such, one could not but exclaim over his faultless mechanism. He sacrificed his life to his cause, long before it was demanded of him, and in the end flung himself to the axe as to a kindred spirit with which his structural and destructive genius was quite in sympathy. One must acknowledge that he made a consistent practice of that which is the true art of reform--to know whom to exclude from one’s system. Only, he was a little too drastic in his exclusion; and that came from a lack of _ton_. For your fanatic sees a reactionary in every one whose mouth opens for what reason soever but to applaud his methods; and the sneers which his sensitiveness regards as levelled at himself, he puts to the account of treason against his policy.

“Citizen Crépin,” he said (for he had already identified my companion), “for the future, if you must ride rough-shod, I would recommend you to make the meanest your first consideration.”

“But, citizen, it was no fault of mine.”

“You have a voice to control, I presume?”--he stepped back and waved his hand. “_Allez vous promener!_”--and the carriage jerked forward.

I shot a glance at the other as we passed. He was retired from the scene, and he seemed endeavouring to control the agitation into which he had been betrayed; but he looked evilly from under his jumping eyelids at us as we went by.

We travelled cautiously until we were gone a long gunshot from the city walls, and then Crépin put his head out of the window and cursed on the postilions furiously.

“_Savant sacré!_” he cried, sinking back on the seat; “we are whipt and rebuked like schoolboys. Is a Republic a seminary for street curs? They should hoist Reason in a balloon if she is to travel. That St Just--he will make it indictable to crack a flea on one’s thumb-nail.”

“What were they doing in that quarter of the town?”

“How should I know, Citizen Thibaut? Spinning webs under the trees, maybe, to catch unwary flies. They and others spend much of each day in the suburbs. It is the custom of attorneys, as it is of story-writers, to hatch their plots in green nooks. They brood for a week that they may speak for an hour. Robespierre comes to Passy and Auteuil for inspiration. Couthon goes every day to Neuilly for bagatelle. My faith, but how these advocates make morality unattractive! A dozen lawyers amongst the elect would produce a second revolt of the angels. That is why the devil is loath to recall them.”

“To recall them?”

“They are his ambassadors, monsieur, and it is his trouble that they are for ever being handed their passports to quit such soil as he would be represented on. Then they return to him for fresh instructions; but they will not understand that human passions are not to be controlled by rule of thumb.”

“Or sounded by depth of plumb, Crépin; and, upon my word, you are a fine bailiff to your masters.”

Now, I have no wish to detail the processes of our monotonous journey into the south-westerly departments, whereto--that is to say, to the borders of Dordogne--it took us eight days to travel. We had our excitements, our vexations, our adventures even; but these were by the way, and without bearing on what I have set myself to relate.

One evening as we were lazily rolling along an empty country road, making for the little walled town of Coutras, where the fourth Henry was known to his credit once upon a time, a trace snapped, leading to more damage and a little confusion amongst the horses. I alighted in a hurry--Crépin, whose veins were congested with Bordeaux, slumbering profoundly on in his corner--and finding that the accident must cause us some small delay, strolled back along the road we had come by, for it looked beautiful in perspective. Our escort, I may say, affecting ignorance of our mishap, had rattled on into the dusk.

It was a night for love, or fairies, or any of those little gracious interchanges of soul that France had nothing the art to conceive in those years. The wind, that had toyed all day with flowers, was sweet with a languorous and desirable playfulness; a ripening girl moon sat low on a causeway of mist, embroidering a banner of cloud that blew from her hands; the floating hills were hung with blots of woodland, and to peer into the trance of sky was to catch a star here and there like a note of music.

I turned an elbow of the road and strolled to a little bridge spanning a brook that I had noticed some minutes earlier in passing. Leaning over the parapet, I saw the water swell to a miniature pond as it approached the arch--a shallow ferry designed to cool the fetlocks of weary horses. The whole was a mirror of placidity. It flowed like a white oil, reflecting in intenser accent the fading vault above, so that one seemed to be looking down upon a subterranean dawn--and, “It is there and thus,” I murmured, “the little people begin their day.”

There were rushes fringing the brook-edge, as I knew only by their sharp reversed pictures in the blanched water-glass, and a leaning stake in mid-stream repeated itself blackly that the hairy goblins below might have something to scratch themselves on; and then this fancy did so possess me that, when a bat dipt to the surface and rose again, its reality and not its shadow seemed to flee into the depths. At last a nightingale sang from a little copse hard by, completing my bewitchment--and so my thraldom to dreams was nearly made everlasting. For, it appeared, a man had come softly out of the woods behind me, while I hung over the parapet, and was stealing towards me on tiptoe with clubbed bludgeon.

It was a stag-beetle that saved my life--whereout of might be snatched many little rags of reflections; for it shot whizzing and booming past my ear and startled me to a sudden sideway jump. The fellow was almost on my back at the moment, and could not check his impetus. He came crack against the low wall, his club span out of his fist, and he himself clutched, failed, and went over with a mighty splash into the water underneath.

The ludicrous _dénoûment_ gave me time to collect my faculties. I was at no loss for an immediate solution of the incident. The highways, in these glorious days of fraternity, were infested with footpads, and no farther than five miles out of Paris we had had trouble with them. Doubtless this rascal, the carriage being out of sight, had taken me for a solitary pedestrian.

I looked over the parapet, feeling myself master of the situation, though I had no weapon upon me. My assailant was gathering his long limbs together in the shallow pool. The water dragged the hair over his eyes and ran in a stream from his bristling chin. Suddenly he saw, drew a pistol, and clicked it at me. It was a futile and desperate action, and calculated only to confirm my estimate of his character.

“_Ventrebleu_ and the devil!” he shouted. “Make way for me, sir.”

I waved my hand, right and left of the ferry. Should he emerge either way, I could easily forestall him.

“You have your choice of roads,” I said, politely.

He recognised his difficulty, and turned as if to wade up stream and escape by the fields. His fourth step brought him into deep water, out of which he floundered snorting.

“Try under the bridge,” I said. “It is the right passage for rats.”

He cursed me volubly.

“Well, we are one to one,” said he in sudden decision, and came splashing out on the Coutras side.

The moment he climbed up the bank I closed with him. He was fairly handicapped by his liquid load, and out of breath and of conceit with his luck besides. He aimed a blow at me with his pistol-butt, but I easily avoided it and let him topple his length again--assisting him in fact--but this time in the dust. Then I sat on him, and threatened his head with a great stone.

“_Pouf!_” said he, panting. “I protest I am no adept at this business.”

“Is it your only one?” said I.

“At this date, yes.”

“So--you have been an honest man? And what more can a patriot boast of?”

I whistled and called to my companions. My prisoner looked amazed.

“You are not alone!” he exclaimed.

“By no means. My escort is round the curve of the road there.”

He seemed to collapse under me.

“_Merci, monsieur!_” he muttered, “_merci!_”

“What, in these days!”

He dared his chance of the stone, and began to struggle violently. I doubt if I could have held him long if Crépin and one of the postilions had not come running up to my shout. A few words were enough to explain the situation, and we conducted the fellow to the carriage and strapped him upon one of the horses in a way compromising to his dignity. And so he became of our party when we moved on once more.

* * * * * * *

Coutras clacks with mills and is musical with weirs. The spirit of the warlike king yet informs its old umber walls and toppling houses. I found it a place so fragrant with antique and with natural beauties, that my heart wept over the present human degeneracy that vulgarised it. It lies amongst the last distant swells, as it were, of the great billows of the Auvergne mountains, before those swells have rolled themselves to waste in the sombre flats of the Landes. It is the hill-slope garden on the fringe of the moor; the resting-place of the sea and the high-rock winds; the hostelry where these meet and embrace and people the vineyards with baby breezes. It has grown old listening under its great chestnuts to the sweet thunder of the Isle and the Dronne. Its peasants, pagan in their instinct for beauty, train their vines up the elm and walnut trees, that in autumn they may dance under a dropping rain of grapes. At the same time, I am bound to confess that their wine suffers for the sake of this picturesqueness.

Now, as we entered it by moonlight, it was a panic town, restless, scurrying, lurid. The new spirit ran vile and naked in its venerable streets; the air was poisonous with the breath of _ça ira_. For, since we left Paris, this had happened. The Girondists were fallen and hunted men, and Tallien and Ysabeau were at La Réole, preparing for a descent on Bordeaux. We learned it all at the gate, and also that the spies and agents of these scoundrels were everywhere abroad, nosing after the escaped deputies, bullying, torturing, and denouncing.

“It would appear we are forestalled,” said Crépin, drily. “M. Thibaut, have you a mind to rake over dead ashes? Well, I have heard of the white wine of Bergerac. At least I will taste that before I go to bed.”

We drove up to the Golden Lion, whither our scamps had preceded us. Patriots hooted our prisoner as we clattered through the streets, or whipped at him with their ramrods. The decent citizens fled before us, and white-faced girls peeped from behind the white curtains of their little bed-chambers, crushing the dimity against their swelling bosoms. Oh! we were great people, I can assure you.

At the hostelry--a high, mud-coloured building, with window-places fringed with stone, and its hill of a roof fretted thick as a dove-cote with dormer casements--they brought to our carriage a poor weeping maid.

“_La demoiselle des pleurs_,” said Bonnet-rouge, with a grin.

“Eh?” said Crépin.

“The _aubergiste_, citizen.”

Crépin looked at the poor creature with disfavour. Certainly she was very plain, though quite young, and her homely face was blowzed with tears.

“Why do you cry then, little fool?”

“Monsieur, they have taken my father to La Réole.”

“He will return, if innocent.”

“Alas! no, monsieur.”

“What! you would discredit the impartiality of the Republic?”

He stepped from the carriage, and took her by the shoulder.

“He will return, if innocent, I say; and would the law had enlarged him before we arrived! You are in charge here, _citoyenne_?”

“But yes, monsieur.”

“A thousand devils!--and disorganised, I’ll swear; no fire in the kitchen, no food in the larder.”

“Monsieur is in error. I go at once to serve the first monsieur of our best.”

“The first--_sacré!_ is that also forestalled? But who is this first?”

“The same as monsieur.”

“And dost thou know who _I_ am?”

“Alas, monsieur! You come and go, and you are all great and imperious. But I would not with a word offend monsieur.”

“Listen, girl.” (A crowd stood about. He spoke for the benefit of all.) “I am a high officer of the Republic, _en mission_ to rout out the disaffected and to enforce the law. Go, and say to this citizen that, with his permission, I will join him.”

Our rogues were unstrapping the footpad from the horse as he spoke. As they tumbled him, half silly with his jolting and with the blows he had received, upon his feet, the _aubergiste_ gave a faint cry. Crépin caught her as she retreated, and twisted her about once more.

“You know this _Chevalier de la Coupe_?”

“Monsieur, I--how can I say? So many drink wine with us.”

He looked at her sternly a moment, then pushed her from him.

“For supper, the best in the house!” he called after her, and turned to arrange for the disposition of his men and their prisoner.

By-and-by the _aubergiste_ came to conduct us to table. As we went thither, Crépin stopped, took the girl by the chin, and looked into her wet inflamed eyes. If the prospect of good fare exhilarated him, I will say, also, for his credit, that I believe he had a kindly nature.

“For the future,” he said, “be discreet and make a study to command your nerves. In these days one must look on life through the little window of the _lunette_.”

We found our forestaller (who, by the way, had returned no answer to Crépin’s polite message) established in the eating-room when we entered it. He was a coarse, blotched ruffian, thick and overbearing, and he stared at us insolently as he lay sprawled over a couple of chairs.

“So, thou wouldst share my supper?” he cried, in a rumbling, vibrant voice. “Lie down under the table, citizen, and thou shalt have a big plate of scraps when once my belly is satisfied.”

Crépin paused near the threshold. I tingled with secret laughter to watch the bludgeoning of these two parvenus. But my respected chief had the advantage of an acquired courtesy.

“You honour me beyond my expectations,” he said. “But, if I were to break the dish over the citizen’s face, the scraps would fall the sooner.”

The other scrambled to his feet with a furious grimace.

“_Canaille!_” he shouted (it was curious that I never heard an upstart but would apply this term in a quarrel to those of his own kidney)--“Scum! pigwash! Do you know my name, my office, my reputation? God’s-blood! I’ve a mind to have you roasted in a fat hog’s skin and served for the first course!”

Crépin walked up to the bully very coolly. _M. le Représentant_ had plenty of courage in the ordinary affairs of life.

“Do I know who you are?” he said. “Why, I take you for one of those curs that are whipt on to do the dirty work of the people’s ministers. And do you know who I am, citizen spy? I hold my commission direct from the Committee of Safety, with full authority of sequestration and requisition, and no tittle of responsibility to your masters at La Réole. If you interfere with the processes of my office, I shall have something additional to say in my report to the chiefs of my department, whom your highness may recognise by the names of Billaud-Varennes and Collot-d’Herbois. If you insult me personally, I shall thrash you with a dog-whip.”

The creature was but a huge wind-bag. I never saw one collapse so suddenly. Crépin, it is true, had some fearful names to conjure by.

“_M. le Représentant_,” said the former, in a fallen, flabby voice, “I have no desire to oppose or embarrass you. We need not clash if I am circumspect. For the rest, accept my apologies for the heat I was betrayed into through inadvertence. We have to be so careful with strangers.”

He bowed clumsily. His neck was choked with a great cravat; a huge sabre clanked on the floor beside him as he moved. He was a very ugly piece of goods, and he bore his humiliation with secret fury, I could perceive--the more so as the _aubergiste_ brought in the first of the dishes during the height of the dispute.

Crépin permitted himself to be something mollified by the sight of supper. He complimented the girl on her promptitude. The poor creature may have been no heroine, but she was a seductive cook. We had _potage_, most excellent, an _entrée_ of chestnut-meal _ramequins_, roasted kid stuffed with _truffes de Périgord_ and served with sweet wine-sauce. Also a magnificent brand of Bergerac was in evidence.

Under the influence of these generous things our table-fellow’s insolence a little revived; but now he would rally me as the safer butt.

“The citizen is dainty with his food.” (The fellow himself had lapped and sucked like a pig.)

“I owe it to the cook,” said I, serenely.

“A debt of love. Thou shalt pay it her presently when the lights are out.”

“You are an ill-conditioned hog,” said I.

He sprang, toppling, to his feet.

“Mother of God!” he stuttered, hoarsely; “this goes too far, this----”

He caught Crépin’s eye and subsided again, muttering. We were all pretty warm with liquor; but my superior officer was grown benignant under its influence.

“For shame, citizens!” he said, blandly, “to put a coarse accent to this heavenly bouquet.”

He had bettered me in the philosophy of the palate. I confess it at once.

The other (his name, we came to know, was Lacombe--a name of infamous notoriety in the Bordeaux business) leaned over to me presently--when Crépin was gone from the room a moment to give a direction--with hell glinting out of his eyes.

“_M. le Représentant’s_ fellow,” said he; “I bow to authority, but I kick authority’s dog in the ribs if the cur molests me.”

“I don’t doubt it. It is probably the measure of your courage.”

He nodded pregnantly.

“The resurrection of France shall be in discretion. That is the real courage to those whose overbearing impulse is to strike. We are discreet, and we watch, and we evolve by degrees the whole alphabet of espionage. Let us call A the language of the hands. These the frost of poverty will stunt, the rack of labour will warp and disjoint. There is your sign of a citizen of the people. Monsieur has very pretty fingers and pink nails.”

“By the same token a corded fist should prove one to be a hangman. Monsieur has a knot for every knuckle.”

He nodded again. His calmness was more deadly than his wrath.

“You spit your insults over the shoulder of your master. You think yourself secure in your office. But there is an order of repartee unknown to patriots, for it was hatched in the hotbeds of Versailles.”

He fell back in his chair--still eyeing me--with a grunt; then suddenly leaned forward again.

“The alphabet,” he said, “of which B shall be designated the penetration of disguises. Coach-drivers, colporteurs, pedlars--oh, one may happen upon the cloven hoof amongst them all.”

I laughed, with a fine affectation of contempt. This mummy at the feast----

There was a sound in the room. I turned my head. The little _aubergiste_ stood at the door, weeping and wringing her hands.

“Monsieur!” she cried, “do not let it be done!”

I rose and went to the child.

“Tell me,” I said, “what is it?”

“Monsieur, the poor man that you captured! they are torturing him in the yard.”

I pointed with my hand to a window. Without, all during our meal, had been a confused clatter of voices and the lurid smoke of torches rising about the glass.

“Yes,” she sobbed, quite overcome. “It is not right, monsieur. It will bring a curse upon the place.”

I ran from the room, my blood on fire. Whatever his offence to me, I had sooner let the rascal go than that he should fall into the hands of drunken patriots.

The yard was a paved space scooped from the rear of the house. A well with a windlass pierced it about the middle, and round the low wall of this were seated a dozen red-bonnets, our own four prominent, shouting and quarrelling and voluble as parrots. Broken bottles strewed the ground, and here and there a torch was stuck into the chinks of the stones, informing all with a jumping glare of red.

I pushed past two or three frightened onlookers, and rushed out into the open.

“Where is he?” I cried in a heat. “What the devil! am I not to pass judgment on my own!”

A moment’s silence fell. The faces of all were turned up to me, scowling and furious. In the pause a pitiful voice came booming and wailing up from the very bowels of the well itself.

“_Merci!_ messieurs, _merci!_ and I will conduct you to the treasure!”

I wore a sword, and I drew it and sprang to the well-mouth.

“God in heaven!” I cried, “what are you doing with him down there?”

Several had risen by this, and were set at me, snarling like dogs.

“The man is forfeit to the law!” they yelped.

“That is for the law to decide.”

“The people are the law. We sit here to condemn him while he cools his heels.”

“Send monsieur to fetch his friend up!” cried Lacombe’s voice over their heads. “He will be dainty to wash his white fingers after a meal!”

There were cries of “Aristocrat!” Possibly they would have put the brute’s suggestion into effect--for a tipsy patriot has no bowels--had not Crépin at that moment run into the yard. I informed him of the situation in a word, as he joined me by the well-side.

“Haul up the man!” he said, coolly and peremptorily. His office procured him some respect and more fear. Our fellows had no stomach but to obey, and they came to the windlass, muttering, and wound their victim up to the surface. He was a pitiable sight when he reached it. They had trussed him to the rope with a savagery to which his swollen joints bore witness, and, with a refinement of cruelty, had cut the bucket from under his feet, that the full weight of his body should hang without support. In this condition they had then lowered him up to his neck in the black water.

He fell, when released, a sodden moaning heap on the stones.

“And what was to be the end?” asked Crépin.

“Citizen _Représentant_, we could not decide; yet a show of hands was in favour of singeing over a slow fire. Grace of God! but it would seem the accused has forestalled the jury.”

He had not, however.

“Give him brandy,” said Crépin; “and bring him to the shed yonder, when recovered, for the _procès verbal_.”

He took my arm, and we went off together to the place designated,--an outbuilding half full of fagots. On the way he beckoned the crying _aubergiste_, who had followed him into the yard, to attend us.

“For the present the man is saved,” he said to her when we were alone. “Now, what is your interest in the rascal?”

“Monsieur, he was an honest man once.”

“Of the neighbourhood?”

She looked up at him with her little imploring red eyes.

“Come,” he said; “I owe you the debt of a grateful digestion.”

“Of the château,” she said faintly.

“What château?”

“Des Pierrettes, monsieur.”

Crépin, as I, I could see, was beating his brains for some memory connected with the name.

“In Février’s _café_!” I said suddenly. Should it prove the same, for the third time destiny seemed bringing me into touch with a lady of this history.

“Ah!” he said. “But it is not on my list. In what direction does it lie, girl?”

“Monsieur, two leagues away, off the Libourne road by the lane of the Marron Cornu.”

“And who inhabits it?”

The poor girl looked infinitely distressed.

“It is M. de Lâge and his niece. You will not make me the instrument to harm them, monsieur. They are patriots, I will swear. Monsieur, monsieur!”

“Silence, girl! What are you to question the methods of the Republic? It is a good recommendation at least that they commission a footpad to patrol the neighbourhood.”

“It is none of their doing. Oh, monsieur, will you not believe me? He was an honest servant of theirs till this religion of Reason drove him to the crooked path. And he has been dismissed this twelvemonth.”

“Harkee, wench! If I read you right, you are well quit of a scoundrel.”

She fell to sobbing and clucking over that again; and in the midst of her outburst the half-revived felon was hustled into the shed.

The poor broken and collapsed creature fell at Crépin’s feet and moaned for mercy.

“Give me a day of life,” he snuffled abjectly, “and I will lead you to the treasure.”

One of the guard pecked at his ribs with his boot.

“_Pomme de chou!_” he grunted, “have you no other song to sing but that?”

But Crépin was looking extremely grave and virtuous.

“The prisoner is in no state to be examined,” he said. “Place him under lock and key, with food and drink; and I will put him to the question later.”

Chapter IV. The ChâTeau Des Pierrettes.

“_Nous y voici!_”

The carriage pulled back with a jerk, so that the prisoner Michel, who sat opposite us, was almost thrown into our laps. One of our grimy escort appeared at the window.

“Dog of a thief!” he growled. “Is this the turning?”

The other _sacréd_ below his breath and nodded sullenly. A vast chestnut (the thick of its butt must have been thirty feet in circumference) stood at the entrance to a narrow lane. Turning, with a worrying of wheels, down the latter, we continued our journey.

Southwards from Coutras we had broken into a _plat_ of country very wild and sterile; but now we were amongst trees again--oak, chestnut, and walnut--that thronged the damp hollows and flung themselves over the low hills in irresistible battalions.

Suddenly Michel bent forward and touched my companion’s knee menacingly. The rascal was near restored to himself, and his lowering eyes were full of gloom.

“The treasure, monsieur,” he said; “is that the condition of my liberty?”

“I have said--discover it to me and thou shalt go free.”

“But I, monsieur, I also must make a condition.”

Crépin stared. The man bent still more earnestly forward.

“Mademoiselle Carinne----”

“The niece of De Lâge----?”

“She must be considered--respected. I will not have her insulted with a look.”

“What now, Michel?”

“Oh, monsieur! you may do as you will with the old, hard man; but her--her----”

“And is it for the lady’s sake thou hast forborne hitherto to appropriate this treasure, the hiding-place of which thou wilt buy thy life by revealing?”

“It is so. I have driven a desperate trade, starving often with this knowledge in my breast.”

“But why?”

“How can I tell? I have known her from a child. Once she struck me that I killed a cheeping wolf-cub she had brought from the snow; and then she was sorry and kissed the little stupid bruise; and I swore my arm should rot before it lost the will to protect her.”

“I will do my best.”

“But that is not enough. My God! if I were to sacrifice mademoiselle’s _dot_ without purpose.”

“The purpose is thy life.”

“That were nothing were she dishonoured.”

I put in a serene word--

“Yet it seems you would condemn her to poverty to save your skin?”

“That is different. I should have life; and life means many things--the power, possibly, to influence her fortunes; at least the wash of wine again in one’s dusty throat.”

“Michel,” I said, “I must applaud you for a capital rogue.”

He stared at me sombrely, muttered, “_Je suis ce que je suis_,” and sank back in his corner.

We were running between dark hedges at the time. Suddenly we came among farm-buildings, a thronging dilapidated group. The byres mouldered on their props; the flat stones of the roofs had flaked generations of rubbish upon the weedy ground beneath.

Crépin rubbed his hands.

“It is well,” he said. “This without doubt is a skinflint.”

We turned a corner and passed the entrance to a ruined drive. Here the tall iron gates, swinging upon massive posts of rubble-stone, had been recently, it seemed, torn from their moorings of grass and knotted bindweed, for the ground was scarred and the lower bars of metal hung with rags of drooping green. Crépin’s features underwent another change at the sight.

“But what is this?” he muttered. “Something unaccustomed--some scare--some panic?”

He looked with sudden fury at the prisoner.

“If he has got wind of our coming--has escaped with----”

He broke off, showing his teeth and grinding his hands together. At the moment we came in view of the château.

It was an old grey house--built of the same material as the gate-pillars--with a high-pitched roof and little corner _tourelles_. Once, presumably, a possession of importance, decay and neglect had now beggared it beyond description. Yet within and without were evidences of that vulgar miserly spirit that seeks by inadequate tinkering to deceive with half-measures. The tangled grass of the lawn was cut only where its untidiness would have been most in evidence, and its litter left where it fell. Triton blew his conch from a fine fountain basin near the middle of the plot; but the shell, threatening to break away, had been fastened to the sea-god’s lips with a ligament of twine that was knotted round the head. A crippled bench was propped with a stone; a shattered ball-capital at the entrance-door held together with a loop of wire. What restoration that was visible was all in this vein of ludicrous economy.

But not a sign of life was about--no footstep in the grounds, no face at any window. To all appearance the place was desolate.

We drew up at the broken stone porch. The door was already flung wide, and we entered, with all the usual insolent clatter of “fraternity,” an echoing hall. Here, as elsewhere, were dust and decay--inconsequent patching and the same tawdry affectation of repair.

A shallow flight of stairs, broad and oaken, led straight up to a little low gallery that bisected the hall like a transom. Up these steps we scuttled, the escort driving the prisoner amongst them, and came to a corridor from which a number of closed doors shut off the living rooms of the house.

Suddenly Crépin put up his hand and motioned us to silence. From one of the invisible chambers, some distance down the corridor, rose and fell, like wind in a key-hole, a little blasphemous complaining voice.

“In the sober moonlight of my days!” we made it out to cry--“after scaling the rough peaks of self-denial, thus to be tilted over into the depths again by a lying Providence!”

There followed some shrill storming of nouns and epithets; then a pause, out of which the voice snapped once more--

“I hear you, you scum of ditches--you stinking offal of the Faubourgs--you publicans ennobled of a short-sighted Saviour!--Come back and finish your work, and I will spit poison on you that you shall follow me to the hell--to the hell, I say----”

The furious dragging of a chair mangled the sentence; then came a jarring thump and a further shrieking of oaths. With one impulse we made for the door, threw it open, and burst into the room. In the midst of a lofty chamber lay a little man struggling on the floor, a pretty heavy _prie-dieu_, to which he had been bound with his arms behind his back, jerking and bobbing above him with his every kick.

“_Mais c’est une tortue!_” cried one of the crew, with a howl of laughter.

The tortoise twisted up its face, disfigured with passion. It was the face, without doubt, of the little _fesse-Mathieu_ of Février’s restaurant.

The room in which he lay was of good proportions, but furnished meagrely, and informed with the same spirit of graceless economy as was apparent without. For the dark ancient panels of its walls had been smeared with some light-grey wash, and an attempt made to decorate them with plaster wreaths and festoons in the Louis Quinze style. The work, however, had been left unfinished, and, so far as it went, was crude and amateurish to a degree. Obviously, here was an example of that species of niggard that will try to cheat a dozen trades by wringing the gist of all out of one poor factotum.

But Crépin stood with corrugated forehead; for there were other signs in the room than those of parsimony--signs in plenty, in fact, that he had been forestalled in his quest. Chairs and tables were overturned, a bureau was smashed almost to pieces, great rents appeared in the panelling of the walls, where search had been instituted, one would judge, for secret depositories.

A savage oath exploded from _M. le Représentant’s_ lips.

“That spy--that swaggerer--that Lacombe!” he muttered, looking at me. “He was vanished this morning--he and his ragged tail--when we rose. He got scent, without doubt, and has played outrider to my mission of search. If it is so; if he has found and removed--my God! but for all his Tallien and the Committee of Bordeaux he shall dance--he shall dance!”

He turned furiously to his men.

“Put the rascal upright,” he bellowed.

A couple of them lifted and spun the chair to its legs, so that the old man’s skull jerked against the head-rail with a clack like that of a mill-hopper. He did not seem to notice the blow. His eyes, ever since they had alighted on this new influx of brigands, had been set like a fish’s--wondering and unwinking. Now they slowly travelled, taking in Crépin, Citizen Thibaut, the escort, until they stopped--actually, it appeared, with a click--at Michel. His mouth puckered, and, like a ring blown by a smoker, a wavering “O!” issued from it.

“Your _ci-devant_ servant?” said Crépin, grimly.

The old man nodded his head.

“Michel. But, yes--it is Michel.”

“Thou owest him compensation for that long tyranny of service.”

“I owe him nothing.”

“And me, citizen? Dost thou remember the Abbaye St Germain and the killings of September?”

I struck in with the question. I was willing, I think, for the girl’s sake, to identify myself with a past incident.

He looked at me bitterly, but with no recognition in his eyes.

“I deplore the cursed fortune,” he cried in grief, “that preserved me but for this!”

“How now, old fool!” said Crépin, with impatience. “Thou shalt go free when Michel has revealed to me thy secret place of hoarding.”

M. de Lâge gave the crying snarl of a wolf.

“Let him go--the ingrate and the traitor! What, Michel! dost thou mangle the hand that gave thee soft litter for thy couch and honest bread for thy belly? Look, Michel!--the white garlands on the walls there! Dost thou remember how thou wrought’st them to pleasure thy mistress--to win her from the depression she suffered in the sombre oak and its long history of gloom? There they cling unfinished,--thy solemn rebuke, Michel. Thy attachment to her was the one reality, thou wouldst say, in a world of shadows, and yet the blatant fanfare of those shadows was all that was needed to win thee from the reality. And what is the price of thy kiss, Judas?”

The man hung his head.

“Not your life, monsieur,” he muttered.

“Nay; but only that which makes my life endurable. And the forfeit--what is that?”

“_My_ life, monsieur.”

De Lâge drew in his breath with a cruel sound.

“_Hélas!_” he cried. “You will have to pay the penalty! the faithful servant will have to pay the penalty!”

Crépin uttered an exclamation and strode forward.

“You have been stripped?” said he.

“Of all, monsieur, of all. There have been others here before you this morning--fine _sans-culotte_ preachers of equality and the gospel of distribution, whose practice, nevertheless, is to enrich the poor at the expense of the wealthy. They were brave fellows by their own showing; yet they must truss me here before they dared brandish the fruits of their robbery before my eyes!”

Suddenly he was straining and screaming in his bonds, his face like a map of some inhuman territory of the passions, branched with veins for rivers of blood.

“Free me that I may kill some one!” he shrieked. “I am mad to groove my fingers in flesh! The time for concessions is past. I was as wax in their hands till they unearthed my plate, my coins, my riches. Now, now----”

He was indeed beyond himself, a better man--or devil--in his despair than the money-conscious craven who had palpitated over that little “_Vive le roi!_” once upon a time.

Crépin regarded the struggling creature with harsh contempt. This plebeian soul also was translated, but not to his moral promotion. It was evident he had enlarged the scope of his anticipations greatly in view of his prisoner’s promise; and his disappointment brought the spotted side of him uppermost.

“Take the dog,” he cried in a hoarse voice (signifying Michel by a gesture), “and whip him to the lair! At least we will look to see if the wolves have left a bone or two for our picking.”

“_M. le Représentant_,” I ventured to say, “be just to consider that the prisoner is by all rights my prisoner. Anyhow he has stuck to his side of the bargain. Let me hold you in fairness responsible for his safe-conduct.”

He turned upon me like a teased bullock.

“In fairness!” he cried--“in fairness! But you presume, citizen, on your position.”

He looked as if he could have struck me; all the beast in the man was prominent. Then he gave the order to march, and I found myself left alone with the little grotesque in the chair.

I was hot and indignant; but the passion of the other seemed to have exploded itself into a rain of emotion. His dry cheeks quivered; the tears ran down them like moisture on an old wall.

“Monsieur,” I said, softly, “I know not whether to applaud or upbraid you. And where is Mademoiselle Carinne?”

He seemed quite broken in a moment--neither to resent nor to be surprised at my mention of the girl’s name.

“She is fled,” he whimpered--“the little graceless cabbage is fled.”

“To safety, I hope?”

“To the devil, for all I care.”

“Monsieur, I hold your wretchedness an excuse, even if you have been careless of----”

He caught me up, staring at me woefully.

“Careless? but, my God! I have pampered and maintained her ever since her brown head was a crutch to my fingers; and this is how she repays me.”

“What has she done?”

“She has condemned me to beggary for a prudish sentiment--me, in my old forlorn age. From the first I saw that the test might come--that she might be called upon to employ the privileges of her sex on my behalf. Free-thought, free-love! Bah! What are they but a self-adaptation to the ever-changing conditions of life. The spirit need not subscribe to such mere necessities of being; and a little gratitude at least was due to me. She has none, and for that may God strike her dead!”

“What has she done?”

“Done!” (His voice rose to a shriek again.) “But, what has she not?--That scoundrel Lacombe would have exchanged me my riches--my pitiful show of tankards that he had unearthed--for her favour. She would not; she refused to go with him; she reviled and cursed me--me that had been her bulwark against poverty.”

“You would have sold her honour for your brazen pots?”

“Gold and silver, monsieur; and it was only a question of temporary accommodation. In a few months she might have returned, and all would have been well again. But honour--bah! it will survive a chin-chuck better than loss of wealth. But she would not. She escaped from us by a lying ruse, and they sought her far and near without avail. At the last they robbed and maltreated me, and for that may hell seize them and fester in their bones!”

“And in thine, thou pestilence!”

My fury and my contempt joined with a clap, like detonating acids.

“Lie there and rot!” I shouted, and so flung out of the room.

My heart blazed. That white girl--that Carinne. I could recall her face, could picture her in her loneliness arraigned before Lacombe and his _sans-culottes_ and his reptile prisoner--defying them all. With some vague instinct of search directing my fury, I hurried through room after room of the empty house. Each was like its neighbour, vulgarised, scantily furnished, disfigured by the search that had been conducted therein. Once I broke into the girl’s own bed-chamber (it was hers, I will swear, by token of little feminine fancies consistent with the character I had gifted her withal), and cursed the beasts who had evidently made it the rallying-point of their brutal jesting. But this, obviously, must be the last place in which to seek her, and I quickly left it.

Not a soul did I happen upon. Of whomsoever the household had consisted, no single individual but the old villain in the chair was remained to brazen out the situation.

At last I made my way into the grounds once more, issuing from the rear of the building into a patch of dense woodland that flowed up to within fifty yards of the walls. I heard voices, and, plunging down a moist track amongst the trees, came immediately in view of my party returning to the house. Then I saw there were two women conducted in its midst, and my throat jumped, and I ran forward.

At least my sudden apprehension was comforted. These crying wenches were of the working class--comely domestics by their appearance.

Crépin stayed them all when he came up to me. The ugly look had not left his face--was intensified on it, in fact. He stared at me, haughty and lowering at once, and was altogether a very offensive creature.

“Has Citizen Thibaut any further exception to take to my methods of procedure?” he said, ironically.

I looked at him, but did not reply.

“Because,” he went on, “perhaps his permission should be asked that these pretty citizenesses accompany me in my carriage?”

“_Mais non, monsieur--par pitié, mais non!_” cried one of the wenches in a sobbing voice.

He bent down to her--a sicklily self-revealed animal.

“Hush, _ma petite_!” he said. “We of the Republic do not ask--we take. Thou shalt have a brighter gown than ever De Lâge furnished for thy shapely limbs.”

She stopped crying, and seemed to listen at that. He came erect again, with a smile on his face and his lips licking together, and regarded me defiantly.

“The Citizen Representative can please himself,” I said, coldly, and pushed past them all and walked on. Crépin turned to look after me, gave a peculiar cynical laugh, and cried “_En avant!_” to his party.

I was to read the significance of his attitude in a moment--to read it in the dead form of Michel hanging from a tree.

I rushed back along the path, and caught the others as they issued from the wood. Crépin heard me coming, bade his men on to the house, and returned a pace or two to meet me. His mood asserted, he was something inclined, I suppose, to a resumption of the better terms between us. At any rate, his expression now was a mixture of embarrassment and a little apprehension. But I spoke to him very staidly and quietly--

“M. Crépin, it dawns upon me that I am slow to learn the methods of the new morality, and that I shall never justify your choice of a secretary.”

“You are going to leave me.”

“There will be the more room in the coach for monsieur’s harem.”

I made him a low bow and went off amongst the trees. He called after me--there was some real regret in his voice--“But you will come to harm! be wise!--monsieur!”

I paid no heed; and the thickets received and buried me.

Chapter V. _La Grand’ BêTe._

My rupture with Crépin was the preface to a period of my life, the details of which I could never but doubtfully piece together in my mind. During this period I lived, but how I supported existence is a problem that it is beyond my power to solve. I have an indistinct memory of wandering amongst trees--always amongst trees; in light and darkness; in drought and in dew; of scaring and being scared by snakes, that rustled from me over patches of dead leaves; of swallowing, in desperate phases of hunger, berries and forest fruits, of whose properties I was as ignorant as of their names.

And, throughout, the strange thought dwelt with me, warm and insistent, that I was the champion elect of that white Carinne with whom I had never so much as exchanged a word. To me she was the Una of these fathomless green depths--the virgin who had carried her maidenhood and her pride to the Republic of the woods, where security and an equal condition were the right of all.

This fanciful image possessed a singular fascination for me. It glimmered behind trees; it peered through the thick interlace of branches; I heard the paddle of its feet in mossy rills, or the low song of its voice rising from some shadow prostrate in beds of fern. No doubt fatigue and hunger and that sense of a long responsibility repudiated came to work a melodious madness in my brain. For days, loitering aimlessly under its spell, I was happy--happier, I believe, than I had ever been hitherto. I had become a thing apart from mankind--a faun--a reversion to the near soulless type, but with the germ of spirit budding in me.

It was a desire to avoid a certain horror dangling over a track that had at first driven me into the thickets, and so lost me my way. The memory of a blot of shadow, on the sunny grass underneath that same horror, that swayed sluggishly, like the disc of a pendulum, as the body swayed above, got into my waking thoughts and haunted them. I wished to put a world-wide interval between myself and the blot--though I had seen monstrosities enough of late, God knows. But, in the silent woods, under that enchanted fancy of my relapse to primitive conditions, a loathing of the dead man, such as Cain might have felt, sickened all my veins. I was done with violence--astonished that its employment could ever have entered into the systems of such a defenceless race as man.

But also I knew that to me, moving no longer under the ægis of authority, the towns and the resorts of men were become quagmires for my uncertain feet. I was three hundred miles from Paris; all my neighbourhood was dominated by Revolutionary Committees; my chance of escape, did once that black cuttle-fish of the “Terror” touch me with a tentacle, a finger-snap would express. My hitherto immunity was due, indeed, to the offices of certain friends, and a little, perhaps, to my constitutional tendency to allow circumstances to shape my personality as they listed. Resigned to the remotest possibilities, my absence of affectation was in a sense my safeguard.

Here, however, far from the centre of operations, that which, under certain conditions, had proved my protection, would avail me nothing. A sober nonchalance, an easy manner, would be the very thyrsus to whip these coarse provincial hinds to madness. And, finding in my new emancipation--or intellectual decadence--an ecstasy I had not known before, I was very tender of my life, and had no longer that old power of indifference in me to the processes of fatality.

How long this state of exaltation lasted I do not know; but I know it came to me all in a moment that I must eat or die. It was the reflection of my own face, I think, in a little pool of water, that wrought in me this first dull recrudescence of reason. The wild countenance of a maniac stared up at me. Its hollow jaws bristled like the withered husks of a chestnut; its lips were black with the juice of berries; an animal _abandon_ slept in the pupils of its eyes. Ah! it was better that reason should triumph over circumstance than that the soul should subscribe tamely to its own disinheritance.

All in an instant I had set off running through the wood. That privilege of man, to dare and to fail, I would not abrogate for all the green retreats of nature.

For hours, it seemed to me, I hurried onwards. My heart sobbed in my chest; my breath was like a knotted cord under my shirt. At last, quite suddenly, blue sky came at me through the trunks, and I broke from the dense covert into a field of maize, and found myself looking down a half mile of sloping arable land upon a large town of ancient houses, whereof at the gate opposite me the tricolour mounted guard on the height of a sombre tower.

Now, in view of this, my purpose somewhat wavering, I sat me down in the thick of the corn and set to wondering how I could act for the best. I had assignats in my pocket, and a little money, yet there could be no dealings for me in the open market. Thinking of my appearance, I knew that by my own act I had yielded myself to the condition of a hunted creature.

All the afternoon I crouched in patches of the higher stalks, peeping down upon the town that, spreading up a gentle slope in the nearer distance, lay mapped before my eyes. Sometimes desperate in my hunger, I would snatch a head of the standing grain; but to chew and swallow more than would just blunt the edge of my suffering would be, I knew, to invite a worser torture. The sun beat on my head; my throat was caked with drought. At last I could endure it no longer, but retreated once more into the wood and waited for the shadows to lengthen.

It was early evening when I ventured into the field again and looked down. The falling sunlight smote the town with fire from the west, so that its walls and turrets seemed to melt in the glare and run into long pools of shadow. But here and there wan ribbons of streets, or patches of open places, broke up the sombreness--in vivid contrast with it--and seemed to swarm, alone of all the dappled area, with crawling shapes.

Of these blotches of whiteness, one flashed and scintillated at a certain point, from some cause I could not at first fathom. Now white, now red, it stretched across the fields a rayed beam that dazzled my wood-haunted eyes with the witchery of its brightness.

But presently I saw the open patch whence it issued grow dark with a press of figures. It was as if a cloth had been pulled over a dead face; and all in a moment the strange flash fell and rose again--like a hawk that has caught a life in its talons,--and a second time swooped and mounted, clustered with red rays,--and a third time and a fourth; but by then I had interpreted the writing on the wall, and it was the “_Mene, mene_,” written on the bright blade of the guillotine by the finger of the setting sun.

A very strange and quiet pity flowed in my veins as I looked. Here was I resting amidst the tranquillity of a golden harvest, watching that other harvest being gathered in. Could it be possible that any point of my picture expressed other than the glowing serenity that was necessary to the composition? I felt as if, in the intervals of the flashing, each next victim must be stepping forward with a happy consciousness of the part he was to play in the design. Then suddenly I threw myself on my face, and crushed my palms against my mouth that I might not shriek curses on the inexorable beauty of the heavens above me.

I did not look again, or rise from my covert till dark was drooping over the hillside. But, with the first full radiance of moonrise, I got to my feet, feeling dazed and light-headed, and went straight off in an easterly direction. My plan was to circumambulate, at a safe distance, the walls (that could enclose no possibility of help to me in my distress), and seek relief of my hunger in some hamlet (less emancipated) on their farther side. If the town was Libourne, as I believed it to be, then I knew the village of St Émilion to lie but a single league to the south-east of it.

Walking as in a dream, I came out suddenly into the highroad, and saw the moon-drenched whiteness of it flow down to the very closed gates far below me. Its track was a desolate tide on which no life was moving; for nowadays the rural population was mostly drifted or driven into the seething market-places of the Revolution. Now my imagination pictured this cold and silent highway a softly tumultuous stream--a welded torrent of phantoms, mingling and pushing and hurrying, in the midst of noiseless laughter, to beat on the town gates and cry out murmuringly that a “suspect” was fording a channel of its upper reaches.

This fright, this fancy (one would hardly credit it) brought the sweat out under my clothes. But it was to be succeeded by a worse. For, as I looked, the boiling wash of moonlight was a road again, and there came up it footsteps rhythmically clanking and unearthly--and others and yet others, till the whole night was quick with their approach. And, as the footfalls neared me, they ceased abruptly, and there followed the sound of an axe ringing down in wooden grooves; and then I knew that the victims of the evening, ghastly and impalpable, were come to gaze upon the man who had indulged his soul, even for a moment, with the enchantment of a prospect whose accent was their agony.

Now, assuredly, my reason was in a parlous state--when, with a whoop that broke the spell, an owl swept above me and fled eastwards down the sky; and I answered to its call, and crossed the road and plunged into fields again, and ran and stumbled and went blindly on once more until I had to pause for breath.

At last I heard the rumbling wash of water, and paused a stone’s-throw from a river-bank; and here a weight of terror seemed to fall from me to mark how wan and sad the real stream looked, and how human in comparison with that other demon current of my imagining. From its bosom a cluster of yards and masts stood up against the sky; and by that I knew that I was come upon the Dordogne where it opened out into a port for the once busy town of Libourne, and that if ever caution was necessary to me it was necessary now.

I looked to my right. A furlong off the rampart of the walls swept black and menacing; and over them, close at hand now, the silent yoke of the guillotine rose into the moonlight. It must have been perched upon some high ground within; and there it stood motionless, its jaws locked in slumber. Could it be the same monster I had watched flashing, scarlet and furious, from the hillside? Now, the ravening of its gluttony was satisfied; Jacques Bourreau had wiped its slobbered lips clean with a napkin. Sullenly satiate, propped against the sky, straddling its gaunt legs over the empty trough at its feet, it slept with lidless eyes that seemed to gloat upon me in a hideous trance.

Bah! Now all this is not Jean-Louis Sebastien de Crancé, nor even Citizen Thibaut. It is, in truth, the half-conscious delirium of a brain swimming a little with hunger and thirst and fatigue; and I must cut myself adrift from the hysterical retrospection.

I hurried towards the river, running obliquely to the south-east. If I could once win to clean water, I was prepared, in my desperation, to attempt to swim to the opposite bank. Stumbling, and sometimes wallowing, I made my way up a sludgy shore and suddenly came to a little creek or cove where a boat lay moored to a post. Close by, a wooden shanty, set in a small common garden with benches, like the Guinguettes of Paris, rattled to its very walls with boisterous disputation, while the shadows of men tossing wine-cups danced on its one window-blind. I unhitched the painter of the boat, pushed the prow from the bank, and, as the little craft swung out into the channel, scrambled softly on board and felt for the sculls in a panic. When I had once grasped and tilted these into the rowlocks, I breathed a great sigh of relief and pulled hurriedly round the stern of a swinging vessel into the cool-running waters of the Dordogne.

It was not until I had made more than half the passage to the farther side that I would venture to pause a moment to assuage my cruel thirst. Then, resting on my oars, I dipped in my hat and drank again and again, until my whole system seemed to flow with moisture like a rush. At last, clapping my sopped hat on my head, I was preparing to resume my work, when I uttered a low exclamation of astonishment, and sat transfixed. For something moved in the stern-sheets of the boat; and immediately, putting aside a cloak under which it appeared he had lain asleep, a child sat up on the bottom boards.

Now, my heart seemed to tilt like a top-heavy thing. Must this hateful necessity be mine, then--to silence, for my own safety, this baby of six or seven, this little comical _poupon_ with the round cropt head and ridiculous small shirt?

He stared at me, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and suddenly began to whimper.

“_Heu! heu!_” he cried in the cheeping voice of a duckling, “_la Grand’ Bête!_”

He took me for the mythical monster of the peasants, whose power of assumption of any form is in ratio with the corrective ingenuity of nurses and mothers.

“Yes,” I said, my brain leaping to an idea; “I am _la Grand’ Bête_, and if you make a noise I shall devour you.”

His eyes were like full brown agates; his chin puckered to his lower lip; but he crushed his little fists against his chest to stay the coming outcry. My face relaxed as I looked at him.

“_La Grand’ Bête_ is kind to the little ones that obey him. Can you use these sculls?”

“_Mais, oui_,” he whispered, with a soft sob; “I am the pretty little waterman.”

“Very well. Now, little waterman, I shall land at the bank over there, and then you can take the sculls and pull the boat across to the cove again. But you must be very silent and secret about having gone with _la Grand’ Bête_ over the river, or he will come to your bedside in the night and devour you.”

I had been rowing gently as I talked, and now the nose of the skiff grounded easily under a low bank. I shipped the sculls, reached forward and took the rogue in my arms.

“Oh! but _la Grand’ Bête_ loves the good children. Be a discreet little waterman, and thou shalt find a gold louis under thy pillow this very day month.”

I kissed him, and, turning, caught at the knots of grass and hauled myself up the bank. It was a clumsy disembarkation for a god, perhaps, but my late comrade did not appear to be shaken in his faith. I stopped and looked back at him when I had run a few yards from the river. He was paddling vigorously away, with a professional air, and the moonlight was shattered on his scull-blades into a rain of diamonds. Suddenly a patrol-boat was pulled up the river across his bows, and I half turned to fly, my heart in my mouth.

“Hullo, hullo, Jacksprat!” cried a rough voice. “What dost thou here at this hour?”

“They were noisy in the _auberge_,” answered the childish treble, “and I could not sleep.”

I went on my way with a smile. To have used the boat and cast it adrift would not have prospered me so well as did this accident. Yet I felt a shame of meanness to hear the little thing, taking its lying cue from me, lie to the men, and I wished I had not clinched my purchase of his silence with that promise of a louis-d’or.

Pushing boldly across a wide moon-dappled margin of grass, so thronged with trees as to afford one good cover, I came out suddenly into a field-track running southwards, and along this I sped at a fast pace. But presently, seeing figures mounting towards me from the dip of a flying slope, I dived into a belt of corn that ran on my left between the track and the skirt of a dense wood, and lay close among the stalks waiting for the travellers to pass. This, however, to my chagrin, they did not; but, when they were come right over against me, they stopped, very disputative and voluble in a breathless manner, and lashed one another with knotty thongs of patriotism.

“But who wants virtue or moderation in a Commonwealth?”

“Dost not thou?”

“I?--I want heads--a head for every cobblestone in the Rue St Jacques. I would walk on the brains of self-seekers. This Roland----”

“He wore strings in his shoes to rebuke the vanity of the Veto----”

“And to indulge his own. Head of a cabbage! thou wouldst weep over the orator though he condemned thy belly to starvation. What! shall I satisfy my hunger with a thesis on the beauty of self-denial, because, like a drum, it has a full sound!”

“Be sure I do not defend him; but has he not practised what he taught?”

“Of a certainty, and is double-damned thereby. For know that these austere moralists have found their opportunity to indulge a hobby--not to avenge a people. What do _we_ want with abstinence who have practised it all our lives? What do we want with interminable phrases on the sublimity of duty?”

“But, thou wilt not understand that political economy----”

“Bah! I know it for the economy of words--that delicious _terminer les débats_ of the jury that rolls another lying mouth into the basket and makes a body the less to feed. But I tell thee, with every fall of the axe I feel myself shifting a place nearer the rich joints at the top of the feast.”

“Liberty----”

“That I desire is the free indulgence of my appetites. Now would not Roland and Vergniaud and their crew shave me nicely for that sentiment? Therefore I love to hunt them down.”

_A vieux chat jeune souris._ How indeed could these old grimalkins, grown toothless under tyranny, digest this tough problem of virtue for its own sake? Their food must be minced for them.

I never saw their faces; but I guessed them, by a certain croaking in their speech, to be worn with years and suffering. Presently, to my disgust, they had out their pipes and a flask of cognac and sat themselves down against the edge of the corn for a mild carouse. I waited on and on, listening to their snuffling talk, till I grew sick with the monotony of it and the cramp of my position. They were, I gathered, informers employed by Tallien in his search for those escaped Deputies who were believed to be in hiding in the neighbourhood.

At last I could stand it no longer. Move I must, for all the risk it entailed. I set to work, very cautiously, a foot at a time, wriggling on my belly through the corn. They took no notice, each being voluble to assert his opinions against the other. Presently, making towards the wood, I found the field to dip downwards to its skirt, so that I was enabled to raise myself to a crouching position and increase my pace. The relief was immense; I was running as the tree-trunks came near and opened out to me.

Now, I was so weary that I thought I must sleep awhile before I proceeded. I was pushing through the last few yards of the stalks when a guttural snarl arrested me. Immediately, right in my path, a head was protruded from the corn, and a bristled snout, slavering in the moonlight, was lifted at me. I stood a moment transfixed--a long moment, it appeared to me. The ridiculous fancy occurred to me that the yellow eyes glaring into mine would go on dilating till presently I should find myself embedded in their midst, like a prawn in aspic. Then, with a feeling of indescribable politeness in my heart, I turned aside to make a _détour_ into the wood, stepping on tiptoe as if I were leaving a sick-room. Once amongst the trees, I penetrated the darkness rapidly to the depth of a hundred yards, not venturing to look behind me, and, indeed, only before in search of some reasonable branch or fork where I might rest in safety. Wolves! I had not taken these into my calculations in the glowing solstice of summer, and it gave me something a shock to think what I had possibly escaped during my unguarded nights in the forest.

At length I found the place I sought--a little natural chair of branches high enough to be out of the reach of wild beasts, yet the ascent thereto easy. I climbed to it, notched myself in securely, and, my hunger somewhat comforted by the water I had drunk, fell almost immediately into a delicious stupor.

I awoke quite suddenly, yet with a smooth swift leap to consciousness. The angle of moonlight was now shifted to an oblique one, so that no rays entered direct; and the space beneath me was sunk into profound darkness. For some moments I lay in a happy trance, dully appreciative of the indistinct shapes that encompassed me, of the smell of living green bark near my face, of the stars embroidered into a woof of twigs overhead. But presently, gazing down, a queer little phenomenon of light fixed my attention, indifferently at first, then with an increase of wonder. This spot of pink radiance waxed and waned and waxed and waned, with a steady recurrence, on the butt of a great tree, twenty yards away. At first it was of a strong rosy tint, but little by little it faded till it was a mere phosphorescent blot; and then, while I was flogging my brains to think what it could be, of a sudden it seemed to fly down to the noise of a little grunting explosion, and break into a shower of scarlet sparks.

At that I was betrayed into a squiggle of laughter; for my phenomenon had in the flash resolved itself into nothing more mysterious than the glow from the pipe of a man seated silently smoking, with his head thrown back against the tree-foot.

“Hullo!” he exclaimed in a surprised voice, but with nothing of fear in it; and I congratulated myself at least that the voice struck a different note to that of either of M. Tallien’s informers. Nevertheless, I had been a fool, and I judged it the wise policy to slide from my perch and join my unseen companion. He made me out, I am sure, long before I did him; yet he never moved or showed sign of apprehension.

“Good evening, Jacques,” said I.

“Good morrow, rather, Jacques squirrel,” he answered.

“Is it so?”

“It is so.”

“You prefer the burrow, it seems, and I the branch.”

“No doubt we are not birds of a feather.”

“Why, truly, I seek Deputies,” I said, in a sudden inspiration.

“And I my fortune,” he answered, serenely.

“We travel by the same road, then. Have you a fragment of bread on you, comrade?”

“If I had a loaf thou shouldst go wanting a crumb of it.”

“And why, citizen?”

“I do not love spies.”

I fetched a grimace over my miscarried ruse.

“Then wilt thou never make thy fortune in France,” I said.

He gave a harsh laugh.

“_You_ will prevent me for that word, citizen.”

I curled myself up under the tree.

“I will wait for the dawn and read thee thy fortune,” I said, “and charge thee nothing for it but a kick to help thee on thy way.”

He laughed again at that.

“Thou provest thyself an ass,” said he, and refilled and lit his pipe and smoked on silently.

I lay awake near him, because, churl as he appeared, I felt the advantage of any human companionship in these beast-haunted thickets.

At last the light of dawn penetrated a little to where we rested, and when it was broad enough to distinguish objects by, I rolled upon my elbow and scrutinised my companion closely.

“Good morrow, then, burner of charcoal.”

He turned to me, a leering smile suspended on his lips.

“_Comment?_” said he.

“But I am a palmist, my friend, as you observe.”

He looked at his stunted and blackened fists.

“Ah! _si fait vraiment_. That is to tell my past condition of poverty, not my fortune.”

“The rest shall come. Observe my fitness for my post. You are from the forests of Nontron.”

He started and stared.

“Truly I have no love for spies,” he muttered, dismayed.

It was my turn to laugh. I had hazarded a bold guess. That he was from the woods rather than from the Landes his gift of seeing through the darkness convinced me. Then, if from the woods, why not from that part of the province where they stretched thickest and most meet for his trade?

“Now,” said I, “for what follows. It comes to your ears that Guienne is hatching a fine breed of maggots from the carcasses of dead aristocrats; that there is a feast of rich fragments toward. You will have your share; you will eat of these aristocrats that have so long fed on you. That is a very natural resolve. But in a Republic of maggots, as in all other communities, there is always a proportion of the brood that will fatten unduly at the expense of its fellows. These despots by constitution appropriate the most succulent parts; they wax thick and strong, and, finally, they alone of the swarm hatch out into flies, while the rest perish undeveloped.”

“It is a cursed parable,” he said, sullenly. “I do not comprehend you.”

“I speak of the people, my friend--of whom you are not one that will fatten.”

“And why, and why?”

“You have scruples. You decry at the outset the methods of this select clique of the Republic that has the instinct to prosper. If I congratulate you on the possession of a conscience, I must deplore in anticipation the sacrifice of yet another martyr to that truism which history repeats as often as men forget it.”

“What truism, sayst thou?”

“That swinish Fortune will love the lusty bully that drains her, though the bulk of the litter starve.”

He spat savagely on the ground.

“I do not comprehend,” he muttered again.

“Well,” I said, “at least let us hope there is an especial Paradise reserved for the undeveloped maggots.”

He rose and stood brooding a moment; then looked away from me and cried morosely, “Get up!”

To my astonishment, from a sort of cradle of roots to the farther side of the tree a young girl scrambled to her feet at his call, and stood yawning and eyeing me loweringly.

“Your daughter?” said I.

“Yes,” he answered, “she is my daughter. What then?”

I jumped up in some suppressed excitement.

“I recall my words,” I said. “You have a chance, after all, down there in Bordeaux. And now I see that it is a thief that fears a spy.”

I pointed at the wench. She was dressed, ridiculously, inappropriately, in a silk gown of a past fashion, but rich in quality, and decorated with a collar of point-lace. Out of this her dirty countenance, thatched with a villainous mop of hair, stuck grotesquely; and the skirt of the dress had been roughly caught up to disencumber her bare feet.

The man stamped on the ground.

“I do not fear you!” he cried furiously, “and I am no thief!”

I laughed derisively.

“But it is true!” he shouted. “A young lady we met in the woods of Coutras would exchange it for Nannette’s _jupon_; and why the devil should we deny her?”

My heart gave a sudden swerve.

“What was she like, this lady?” I said.

The fellow glanced sulkily askance at me.

“Does not the spy know?” he said.

“Perhaps he does. Say this demoiselle was slender and of a reasonable height; that she had brown hair, and grey eyes under dark brows; that her face was of a cold, transparent whiteness; that she spoke with a certain soft huskiness in her voice.”

He cried under his breath, with a note of fright, “The devil is in this man!”

I laughed and took off my hat and made the two a bow.

“To your quick advancement in Bordeaux!” I said.

He stared a moment, seemed to hesitate; then, roughly summoning the girl to follow him, strode off through the wood. The moment they were out of sight I sat down again to ponder.

Was it true, then, that these peasants had met Carinne--that they had helped her to a disguise--for what purpose? She must have been in the woods whilst I was there--accursed destiny that kept us apart! At least I must return to them at once and seek her.

I broke into a queer embarrassed fit of laughter.

What self-ordained mission was this? What was my interest in the girl, or how would she not resent, perhaps, the insolence of my interference? She had no claim upon my protection or I upon her favour.

Very well and very well--but I was going to seek her, nevertheless. Such queer little threads of irresponsible adventure pulled me in these days.

But, at first for my hunger. It was a great voice in an empty house. It would not be refused or put off with a feast of sentiment. Eat I must, if it was only of a hunk of sour pease-bread.

Suddenly I thought of that bestial apparition at the wood-skirt. There had been a liquid “yong” in its snarl, as if it could not forbear the action of gluttonous jaws even while they were setting at an intruder. Perhaps the remains of a goat----!

I started running towards the point at which, I believed, I had entered amongst the trees. Very shortly I emerged into the open, and saw the cornfield shimmering violet before me in the dawn. I beat up and down amongst the standing grain, and all in a moment came upon that I sought. A goat it might have been (or a scapegoat bearing the sins of the people) for anything human in its appearance. Yet it was the body of a man--of a great man, too, in his day, I believe--that lay before me in the midst of a trampled crib of stalks, but featureless, half-devoured--a seething abomination.

Now, in the placid aftermath of my fortunes, I can very easily shudder over that thought of the straits to which hunger will drive one. Then, I only know that through all the abhorrence with which I regarded the hideous remains, the sight of an untouched satchel flung upon the ground beside them thrilled me with hope. I stooped, had it in my hands, unbuckled it with shaking fingers. It was full to choking of bread and raisins and a little flask of cognac. Probably the poor wretch had not thought it worth his while to satisfy the needs of an existence he was about to put an end to. For the horn handle of a knife, the blade of which was hidden in the decaying heart of the creature, stood out slackly from a hoop of ribs.

I withdrew into the wood, and without a scruple attacked the provisions. It was a dry and withered feast; yet I had been fastidiously critical of many a _service aux repas_ at Versailles that gave me not a tithe of the pleasure I now enjoyed. And at the last I drank to the white Andromeda whose Perseus I then and there proclaimed myself to be.

Chapter VI. The Herd Of Swine.

I was back in the woods of Pierrettes, my precious satchel, still but two-thirds emptied, slung about my shoulders, my clothes wrinkled dry from their sopping in the waters of the Dordogne. All that day of my finding of the food had I lain concealed in the woods; but, with the fall of dusk, I made my way, by a long _détour_, to the river-bank, and crossed the stream swimming and in safety. And now was I again _la Grand’ Bête_, seeking to trace in the scent of trodden violets the path by which my phantom Carinne had vanished.

That night I passed, warned by experience, in the branches of a tree. With dawn of the following day I was on foot again, striking northwards by the sun, and stretching over the encumbered miles with all the speed I could accomplish. I had a thought in my breast, and good fortune enabled me to put it to the proof. For, somewhere about four o’clock as I judged, I emerged into a woodland track that I felt convinced was the one made detestable by a dangling body; and sure enough I came of a sudden to the fatal tree, and was aware of a cut slack of rope hanging from a branch thereof, though the corpse itself was removed.

Now, it behoved me to proceed with caution, which I did; yet none so successfully but that I came plump out of the mouth of the green passage upon M. de Lâge himself, and saw and was seen by him in a single moment. Therefore I had nothing for it but to brazen out the situation.

He showed no disturbance at my approach, nor, indeed, did he take any notice of me; but he crept hither and thither, with lack-lustre eyes, gathering nettles. I went up to him, suppressing my repugnance of the miserable creature.

“Is mademoiselle returned?” I said outright.

He stopped in his picking, and leered up at me vaguely. He seemed utterly broken and forlorn.

“She will not return,” he said; and resumed his task. I stood some moments watching him. Suddenly he clasped his hands plaintively together and looked me again in the face.

“Why did she go at all?” he said. “Can monsieur tell me, for I forget?”

He put his fingers aimlessly, like an infant, to his head.

“I had a pride in her. She was beautiful and self-willed. _Mon Dieu!_ but she would make me laugh or tremble, the rogue. Well, she is gone.”

Could it be that his every memory of his villainy was lost with his cherished tankards?

“What a love was mine,” he murmured. “I would have denied her nothing--in reason; and she has deserted me.”

“Monsieur,” I said, “do you remember me?”

“You, you!” he cried angrily--“what do I know or care about this Orson that springs upon me from the green? You need to be shaved and washed, monsieur.”

“Undoubtedly; if monsieur would provide me with the means?”

He gave me a quick inquisitive look.

“You have a queer accent for a patriot. Well, well--it is no concern of mine.”

Again he resumed his task, again to pause in it.

“Do you seek a service? I hear it is the case with many.”

“I seek food and a lodging for the night.”

“Eh! but can you pay for them?”

“In reason--certainly, in reason.”

“So, then?--should Georgette bring a generous basketful--bah!” he cried suddenly, stamping irritably on the ground--“I offer you my poor hospitality, monsieur, and” (the leer came into his eyes again)--“should monsieur feel any scruple, a vail left on the mantelpiece for the servants will doubtless satisfy it.”

But he had no servant left to him, it would seem. When, by-and-by, he ushered me, with apish ceremony, into his house, I found the place desolate and forlorn as we had left it.

“I have reduced my following,” he said, “since my niece withdrew herself from my protection. What does a single bachelor want with an army of locusts to devour him?”

He showed me into a little bare room on the second floor, with nothing worthy of remark in it but an ill-furnished bedstead, and a baneful picture on the wall that I learnt was a portrait of Carinne by herself.

“It is a little of a travesty,” said De Lâge. “She looked in a mirror, and painted as she saw herself therein--crooked, like a stick dipt under water. But she was clever, for all she insisted that this was a faithful likeness.”

I believe there were tears on his face as he left me. What a riddle was the creature! There is a blind spot in every eye, it is said--and the eyes are the windows of the soul.

He had supplied me with soap and water and a razor, and these I found almost as grateful to my wants as the satchel had been. When I was something restored to cleanliness I descended to the corridor below, and, attracted by a sound of movement, entered one of the rooms that opened therefrom.

Within, a young woman was engaged in laying one end of a carved-oak table with a white napkin. She looked round as I advanced, stared, gave a twitter of terror, and, retreating to the wall, put an arm up, with the elbow pointed at me, as if I were something horrible in her sight.

I had a sharp intuition; for this, I saw, was the little _aubergiste_ of the ‘Golden Lion.’

“You think me responsible for the poor rogue’s hanging?” I said.

She whispered “Yes,” with a pitiful attempt to summon her indignation to this ordeal of fear. I went up to her and spoke gently, while she shrunk from me.

“Georgette, my child, it is not so. You must take that on my honour, for I am a gentleman, Georgette, in disguise.”

“In disguise?” she whispered, with trembling lips; but her eyes wondered.

“Truly, little girl; I am a wanderer now, and proscribed because I would not lend myself to thy Michel’s punishment.”

“Oh!” she sobbed, “but it was cruel. And the Republic destroys its own children, m’sieu’.”

“Thy father----?”

“Ah! he, at least, is back, if still under surveillance; otherwise I should not be enabled to come daily to minister to the needs of this poor lonely old man.”

“Now thou art a good soul, thou little _aubergiste_. And thy ministrations are meat to him, I perceive.”

“Hush, m’sieu’! but if he were to hear? He asks no questions, he accepts all like a child. He would die of shame were he to learn that he owes his dinner to the gratitude of m’sieu’ his father’s dependant.”

“Is he so sensitive? Thou great little Georgette! And mademoiselle--she does not return?”

She shook her head.

“Tell me where she is, child; for I believe you know.”

“Oh!” she murmured, obviously in great distress, “m’sieu’ must not ask me.”

I took her hands and drew her towards me.

“Look in my eyes and tell me what you see there.”

She glanced up scared and entreating.

“But, is it cruelty, false faith, the currish soul of the liar and informer?”

“No, no, m’sieu’.”

“Then is it not, rather, the honour of a gentleman, the chivalry that would help and protect a defenceless woman cast adrift in this fearful land of blood and licence?”

I gave her my title.

“Now,” I said, “you can cast me to the axe with a word. And where is Mademoiselle Carinne, Georgette?”

She still hesitated. I could see the little womanly soul of her tossing on a lake of tears.

“At least,” I said, “she will not return hither?”

“She will never return--oh, monseigneur! she will never return; and it is not for me to say why.”

I released her hands.

“Well,” I said, “I would have helped her and have cared for her, Georgette; but you will not let me.”

She broke forth at once at that, her arms held out and her eyes swimming.

“I will tell you, monseigneur--all that I know; and God forgive me if I do wrong!”

“And me, Georgette, and wither me with His vengeance.”

“I will tell you, monseigneur. That night--that night after the terror, she spent in the woods, and all the next day she hid there, moving towards Coutras. I would go often to the Château to take to M. de Lâge the money for our weekly bill of faggots, and--and for other reasons; and now she watched for me and waylaid me and told me all. Oh, m’sieu’! she was incensed--and it was not for me to judge; but M. de Lâge is a wise man, and perhaps there is a wisdom that makes too little account of the scruples of our sex.”

“She would not return to him? Well!”

“She would beg or starve sooner, she said; and she would begin by asking a little food of me. Oh, m’sieu’, but the sad proud demoiselle! My heart wept to hear her so humble to the peasant girl to whom she had been good and gracious always in the old days of peace.”

“That is well. And where is she?”

“I cannot tell you, m’sieu’. Ah, pardon! She but waited for the night, when I could bring her food--all that would keep and that she could carry--and then she started on foot for the mountains of Gatine.”

“Now, _mon Dieu_! they must be twenty leagues away.”

“Twenty-five, m’sieu’, by La Roche Chalais and Mareuil. But she would avoid the towns, and journey by way of the woods and the harsh desolate country. Mother of God! but it makes me weep to think of her white face and her tender feet in those frightful solitudes.”

“It is madness!”

“But indeed, m’sieu’. And, though the towns gather all to them and the country is depopulated, there may be savages still left here and there--swineherds, charcoal-burners, to whom that libertine Lacombe----”

“Silence, girl! And you would have denied her a protector!”

“She bound me to silence, m’sieu’, lest her uncle should send in pursuit.”

“It is madness--it is madness. And what does she go to seek in the mountains?”

“Ah! m’sieu’, I know not--unless it is some haven of rest where the footstep of man is never heard.”

“Now, Georgette; will you meet me to-night where you met her, and bring me food--for which I will pay you--and point me out the way that Mademoiselle Carinne took at parting? I have a mind to journey to the mountains, also, and to go by the harsh country and to start in the dark. Will you, Georgette?”

“Pray the good God,” she said, “that it is not all a _jeu de l’oie_”--and at that moment we heard De Lâge feebly mounting the stairway.

He entered the room and accosted me with a sort of sly courtesy that greatly confounded me. Associations connected with my reappearance, perhaps, had kindled the slow fuse of his memory; but the flame would burn fitfully and in a wrong direction; and, indeed, I think the shock of his loss (of the tankards) had quite unhinged his mind.

“Shall we fall to?” he said. “This is not Paris; yet our good country Grisels can canvass the favour of a hungry man.”

He gave a ridiculous little laugh.

“And what have we here, girl?” he said.

“M’sieu’, it is a pasty of young partridges.”

His palate was not dulled with his wits. It foretasted the delicacy and his eyes moistened. He lingered regretfully over the wedge he cut for me.

“Be generous, monsieur,” he cried, with an enjoying chuckle, “and own that you have been served none better at Véry’s. Oh, but I know my Paris! I was there so late as September of last year, and again, on business connected with my estate, during the month of the king’s trial.”

He blenched over some sudden half-memory; but the sight of Georgette carrying my platter to me restored him to the business of the table.

“I know my Paris!” he cried again. “I have taken kidneys with champagne at La Rapée’s; sheep’s feet at la Buvette du Palais; oysters at Rocher de Cançale. Ho-ho! but does monsieur know the Rocher?”

“_Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis, et ego restaurabo vos!_” I said, quoting a well-known inscription over an eating-house.

He gave a sharp little squeak.

“Eh! but monsieur has the right etymology of the _restaurateur_; he is a man of taste and of delicacy. This poor burgundy” (he clawed up his glass)--“it might have been Clos Vougeot de Tourton if monsieur had not been so stringent in his sequestration.”

He favoured me with a leer--very arch and very anxious. I could only stare. Evidently he took me, in his wandering mind, for some other than that I was. I was to be enlightened in a moment.

It was when Georgette had left the room and we were alone. The falling sunlight came through a curtain of vine-leaves about the window, and reddened his old mad face. He bent forward, looking at me eagerly.

“Hush, monsieur! The plate--the tankards--the christening-cups! You will let me have them back? My God! there was a cross, in niello, of the twelfth century. It will bring you nothing in the markets of the Vandals. Monsieur, monsieur! I accept your terms--hot terms, brave terms for a bold wooer. But you must not seek to carry her with a high hand. She knows herself, and her pride and her beauty. Hush! I can tell you where she lies hidden. She crouches under a rosebush in the garden, and as the petals fall, they have covered and concealed her.”

Now I understood. He was again, in his lost soul, staking Carinne against his forfeited pots. He took me for Lacombe.

I jumped to my feet.

* * * * * * *

And now began my second period of wandering; but under conditions infinitely more trying than the first. Keeping to the dense woods by day, and traversing the highways only by night, I had hitherto escaped that which was to prove the cruellest usurer of my vigour--the merciless blazing sun. Here, as I travelled by desolate broomy wastes; by arid hills, from which any knob of rock projecting was hot as the handle of an oven; by choking woods and endless winding valleys,--I would sometimes ask myself in amazement what could be the nature of the infatuation that for its own sake would elect to endure these sufferings. I had not spoken to the girl. I was not authorised to champion her cause. Strangest of all, the lack of womanly sensitiveness she had displayed under the very ordeal of St Fargeau’s dying groans had not prepossessed me in her favour. Yet, slowly was I making, and would continue to make, my way to these mountains of Limosin, in the dreamy hope of happening upon a self-willed and rather heartless young woman, who--if we _were_ to come together--would probably resent my intrusion as an affront. Truly an eccentric quest.

Well--I was unaccountable to myself, and of no account to others. Maybe that last is the explanation. My world of conventions was dead, and I lived--as I have already said--a posthumous life. Through it, no doubt, I was drawn by shadows--attracted by the unexplainable--blown by any wind of irresponsibility. This anarchy at least opened out strange vistas of romance to the imaginative soul. It is odd to live apart from, and independent of, the voice of duty. That state shall seldom occur; but, when it does, to experience it is to something feel the marvel of dematerialisation.

Depleted of human life; savage in its loneliness; blistered and flaked by the sun, the country through which I travelled was yet beautiful to a degree. Of food--by means of eking out my little supply with chestnuts and wild berries--I had a poor sufficiency; but thirst tortured me often and greatly. I moved slowly, threshing the land, as it were, for traces of an ignis-fatuus that still fled before me in fancy. And I had my frights and perils--one adventure, also; but that I shall not in this connection relate.

Once, high up on the ridge of a valley, I saw a poor wretch, his arms bound behind him, hurrying forward under escort of a guard. It was evening, soft and tranquil. A cluster of mountain-peaks swam in the long distance; the horizon was barred with a grate of glowing clouds. Therethrough, it seemed, the consumed sun had fallen into white ashes of mist; but the cooling furnace of the sky, to the walls of which a single star clung like an unextinguished spark, was yet rosy with heat; and against the rose the hillside and the figures that crowned it were silhouetted in a sharp deep purple. How beautiful and how voiceless! The figure fell, and his scream came down to me like a bat’s cheep as the soldiers prodded him to rise with their bayonets. Then I cursed the Goths that had spoiled me my picture.

Another time, lying concealed in a little hanging copse above a gorge, I heard bleating below me and the rainy patter of feet, and peered forth to see a flock of goats being driven down the valley. They were shepherded by three or four ‘requisition’ men, as they were called--patriot louts whose business it was to beat up the desolated country for those herds of sheep or swine that had run wild for lack of owners. Their unexpected appearance was a little lesson in caution to me, for I had enjoyed so long an immunity from interference as to have grown careless of showing myself in the most exposed districts.

On two occasions only was I troubled by wolves. The first was on a morning of lassitude and fatigue, when water had failed me for many hours. I was resting, on a heath-covered slope, within a rocky cave or lair in the hillside. For long the sky wraiths had been loading cloud upon cloud, till the gathered steam of the earth, finding no outlet, seemed to scald one’s body. Then, in a moment, such a storm crashed down as I had never before experienced. Each slam of thunder amongst the rocks was like a port of hell flung open; the lightning, slashing through the hail, seemed to melt and run in a marrowy-white flood that palpitated as it settled down on the heather. But the hail! the fury of this artillery of ice--its noise, and the frenzy of the Carmagnole it danced! I was fortunate to be under a solid roof; and when at last the north wind, bristling with blades, charged down the valley like the Duke of Saxony’s Horse at Fontenoy, I thought the earth must have slipped its course and swerved into everlasting winter.

Suddenly the mouth of the _ressui_ was blotted by a couple of shaggy forms. They came pelting up--their tails hooked like carriage-brakes to their bellies, their eyes blazing fear--and, seeing me within, jerked to a rigid halt, while the stones drummed on their hides. The next moment, cowed out of all considerations of caste, they had slunk by me and were huddled, my very sinister familiars, at the extreme end of the cave.

Oh, but this was the devil of an embarrassment! I had sat out sermons that stabbed me below the belt at every second lunge; I had had accepted offers of gallantry that I had never made; I had ridiculed the work of an anonymous author to his face. Here, however, was a situation that it seemed beyond my power of _finesse_ to acquit myself of with _aplomb_. In point of fact, the moment the storm slackened, I slipped out--conscious of the strange fancy that bristles were growing on my thighs--and, descending hurriedly to the valley, climbed a tree. It was only then (so base is human nature) that I waived the pretence that the wolf is a noble animal.

But my second experience was a more finished one. Then I tasted the full flavour of fright, and almost returned the compliment of a feast to my company. I was padding, towards evening, over a woodland lawn, when from a hollow at the foot of a great chestnut-tree a rumbling snarl issuing vibrated on the strings of my sensibilities, and I saw three or four very ugly snouts project themselves from the blackness. I went steadily by and steadily continued my way, which without doubt was the discerning policy to pursue. But impulse will push behind as well as fly before reason, and presently that which affects the nerves of motion did so frantically hustle me at the rear as to set me off running at the top of my speed. Then the folly of my behaviour was made manifest to me, for, glancing over my shoulder as I sped, I saw that no fewer than five fierce brutes were come out of their lair at the sound, and were beginning to slink in my wake.

I gave a yell that would have fetched Charon from the other side of the Styx; my feet seemed to dance on air; I threatened to outstrip my own breath. Still the patter behind me swelled into a race, and I found myself ghastlily petting a thought as to the length of a wolfs eye-tooth and the first feel of it clamped into one’s flesh. Now, of a sudden, the wood opened out, and I saw before me the butt of a decayed tree, and, on its farther side, a little reedy pond shining livid under a rampart of green that hedged off the sunset. At the water I drove, in a lost hope that the pursuit would check itself at its margin, and, in my blind onset, dashed against a branch of the dead tree and fell half stunned into the pool beyond. Still an inspiring consciousness of my peril enabled me to scramble farther, splashing and choking, until I was perhaps twenty yards from the shore; and then, in shallow water, I sat down, my head just above the surface, and caught at my sliding faculties and laughed. Immediately I was myself again, and the secure and wondering spectator of a very Walpurgis dance that was enacting for my benefit on the bank.

The five wolves appeared, indeed, to be skipping in pure amazement, like the mountains of Judæa; but they howled in tribulation, like the gate of Palestina. They leapt and ran hither and thither; they bit at the air, at their flanks, at their feet; they raked their heads with their paws and rolled on the ground in knots. At last I read the riddle in a tiny moted cloud that whirled above them. In dashing against the rotten branch I had, it seemed,