Le Chapelier’s importance was reflected in the sudden servility of the shirt-sleeved, white-aproned waiter of whom Andre-Louis inquired for the representative.
M. Le Chapelier was above-stairs with friends. The waiter desired to serve the gentleman, but hesitated to break in upon the assembly in which M. le Depute found himself.
Andre-Louis gave him a piece of silver to encourage him to make the attempt. Then he sat down at a marble-topped table by the window looking out over the wide tree-encircled square. There, in that common-room of the café, deserted at this hour of mid-afternoon, the great man came to him. Less than a year ago he had yielded precedence to Andre-Louis in a matter of delicate leadership; to-day he stood on the heights, one of the great leaders of the Nation in travail, and Andre-Louis was deep down in the shadows of the general mass.
The thought was in the minds of both as they scanned each other, each noting in the other the marked change that a few months had wrought. In Le Chapelier, Andre-Louis observed certain heightened refinements of dress that went with certain subtler refinements of countenance. He was thinner than of old, his face was pale and there was a weariness in the eyes that considered his visitor through a gold-rimmed spy-glass. In Andre-Louis those jaded but quick-moving eyes of the Breton deputy noted changes even more marked. The almost constant swordmanship of these last months had given Andre-Louis a grace of movement, a poise, and a curious, indefinable air of dignity, of command. He seemed taller by virtue of this, and he was dressed with an elegance which if quiet was none the less rich. He wore a small silver-hilted sword, and wore it as if used to it, and his black hair that Le Chapelier had never seen other than fluttering lank about his bony cheeks was glossy now and gathered into a club. Almost he had the air of a petit-maitre.
In both, however, the changes were purely superficial, as each was soon to reveal to the other. Le Chapelier was ever the same direct and downright Breton, abrupt of manner and of speech. He stood smiling a moment in mingled surprise and pleasure; then opened wide his arms. They embraced under the awe-stricken gaze of the waiter, who at once effaced himself.
“Andre-Louis, my friend! Whence do you drop?”
“We drop from above. I come from below to survey at close quarters one who is on the heights.”
“On the heights! But that you willed it so, it is yourself might now be standing in my place.”
“I have a poor head for heights, and I find the atmosphere too rarefied. Indeed, you look none too well on it yourself, Isaac. You are pale.”
“The Assembly was in session all last night. That is all. These damned Privileged multiply our difficulties. They will do so until we decree their abolition.”
They sat down. “Abolition! You contemplate so much? Not that you surprise me. You have always been an extremist.”
“I contemplate it that I may save them. I seek to abolish them officially, so as to save them from abolition of another kind at the hands of a people they exasperate.”
“I see. And the King?”
“The King is the incarnation of the Nation. We shall deliver him together with the Nation from the bondage of Privilege. Our constitution will accomplish it. You agree?”
Andre-Louis shrugged. “Does it matter? I am a dreamer in politics, not a man of action. Until lately I have been very moderate; more moderate than you think. But now almost I am a republican. I have been watching, and I have perceived that this King is — just nothing, a puppet who dances according to the hand that pulls the string.”
“This King, you say? What other king is possible? You are surely not of those who weave dreams about Orleans? He has a sort of party, a following largely recruited by the popular hatred of the Queen and the known fact that she hates him. There are some who have thought of making him regent, some even more; Robespierre is of the number.”
“Who?” asked Andre-Louis, to whom the name was unknown.
“Robespierre — a preposterous little lawyer who represents Arras, a shabby, clumsy, timid dullard, who will make speeches through his nose to which nobody listens — an ultra-royalist whom the royalists and the Orleanists are using for their own ends. He has pertinacity, and he insists upon being heard. He may be listened to some day. But that he, or the others, will ever make anything of Orleans... pish! Orleans himself may desire it, but the man is a eunuch in crime; he would, but he can’t. The phrase is Mirabeau’s.”
He broke off to demand Andre-Louis’ news of himself.
“You did not treat me as a friend when you wrote to me,” he complained. “You gave me no clue to your whereabouts; you represented yourself as on the verge of destitution and withheld from me the means to come to your assistance. I have been troubled in mind about you, Andre. Yet to judge by your appearance I might have spared myself that. You seem prosperous, assured. Tell me of it.”
Andre-Louis told him frankly all that there was to tell. “Do you know that you are an amazement to me?” said the deputy. “From the robe to the buskin, and now from the buskin to the sword! What will be the end of you, I wonder?”
“The gallows, probably.”
“Pish! Be serious. Why not the toga of the senator in senatorial France? It might be yours now if you had willed it so.”
“The surest way to the gallows of all,” laughed Andre-Louis.
At the moment Le Chapelier manifested impatience. I wonder did the phrase cross his mind that day four years later when himself he rode in the death-cart to the Greve.
“We are sixty-six Breton deputies in the Assembly. Should a vacancy occur, will you act as suppleant? A word from me together with the influence of your name in Rennes and Nantes, and the thing is done.”
Andre-Louis laughed outright. “Do you know, Isaac, that I never meet you but you seek to thrust me into politics?”
“Because you have a gift for politics. You were born for politics.”
“Ah, yes — Scaramouche in real life. I’ve played it on the stage. Let that suffice. Tell me, Isaac, what news of my old friend, La Tour d’Azyr?”
“He is here in Versailles, damn him — a thorn in the flesh of the Assembly. They’ve burnt his chateau at La Tour d’Azyr. Unfortunately he wasn’t in it at the time. The flames haven’t even singed his insolence. He dreams that when this philosophic aberration is at an end, there will be serfs to rebuild it for him.”
“So there has been trouble in Brittany?” Andre-Louis had become suddenly grave, his thoughts swinging to Gavrillac.
“An abundance of it, and elsewhere too. Can you wonder? These delays at such a time, with famine in the land? Chateaux have been going up in smoke during the last fortnight. The peasants took their cue from the Parisians, and treated every castle as a Bastille. Order is being restored, there as here, and they are quieter now.”
“What of Gavrillac? Do you know?”
“I believe all to be well. M. de Kercadiou was not a Marquis de La Tour d’Azyr. He was in sympathy with his people. It is not likely that they would injure Gavrillac. But don’t you correspond with your godfather?”
“In the circumstances — no. What you tell me would make it now more difficult than ever, for he must account me one of those who helped to light the torch that has set fire to so much belonging to his class. Ascertain for me that all is well, and let me know.”
“I will, at once.”
At parting, when Andre-Louis was on the point of stepping into his cabriolet to return to Paris, he sought information on another matter.
“Do you happen to know if M. de La Tour d’Azyr has married?” he asked.
“I don’t; which really means that he hasn’t. One would have heard of it in the case of that exalted Privileged.”
“To be sure.” Andre-Louis spoke indifferently. “Au revoir, Isaac! You’ll come and see me — 13 Rue du Hasard. Come soon.”
“As soon and as often as my duties will allow. They keep me chained here at present.”
“Poor slave of duty with your gospel of liberty!”
“T
rue! And because of that I will come. I have a duty to Brittany: to make Omnes Omnibus one of her representatives in the National Assembly.”
“That is a duty you will oblige me by neglecting,” laughed Andre-Louis, and drove away.
CHAPTER IV. AT MEUDON
Later in the week he received a visit from Le Chapelier just before noon.
“I have news for you, Andre. Your godfather is at Meudon. He arrived there two days ago. Had you heard?”
“But no. How should I hear? Why is he at Meudon?” He was conscious of a faint excitement, which he could hardly have explained.
“I don’t know. There have been fresh disturbances in Brittany. It may be due to that.”
“And so he has come for shelter to his brother?” asked Andre-Louis.
“To his brother’s house, yes; but not to his brother. Where do you live at all, Andre? Do you never hear any of the news? Etienne de Gavrillac emigrated years ago. He was of the household of M. d’Artois, and he crossed the frontier with him. By now, no doubt, he is in Germany with him, conspiring against France. For that is what the emigres are doing. That Austrian woman at the Tuileries will end by destroying the monarchy.”
“Yes, yes,” said Andre-Louis impatiently. Politics interested him not at all this morning. “But about Gavrillac?”
“Why, haven’t I told you that Gavrillac is at Meudon, installed in the house his brother has left? Dieu de Dieu! Don’t I speak French or don’t you understand the language? I believe that Rabouillet, his intendant, is in charge of Gavrillac. I have brought you the news the moment I received it. I thought you would probably wish to go out to Meudon.”
“Of course. I will go at once — that is, as soon as I can. I can’t to-day, nor yet to-morrow. I am too busy here.” He waved a hand towards the inner room, whence proceeded the click-click of blades, the quick moving of feet, and the voice of the instructor, Le Duc.
“Well, well, that is your own affair. You are busy. I leave you now. Let us dine this evening at the Café de Foy. Kersain will be of the party.”
“A moment!” Andre-Louis’ voice arrested him on the threshold. “Is Mlle. de Kercadiou with her uncle?”
“How the devil should I know? Go and find out.”
He was gone, and Andre-Louis stood there a moment deep in thought. Then he turned and went back to resume with his pupil, the Vicomte de Villeniort, the interrupted exposition of the demi-contre of Danet, illustrating with a small-sword the advantages to be derived from its adoption.
Thereafter he fenced with the Vicomte, who was perhaps the ablest of his pupils at the time, and all the while his thoughts were on the heights of Meudon, his mind casting up the lessons he had to give that afternoon and on the morrow, and wondering which of these he might postpone without deranging the academy. When having touched the Vicomte three times in succession, he paused and wrenched himself back to the present, it was to marvel at the precision to be gained by purely mechanical action. Without bestowing a thought upon what he was doing, his wrist and arm and knees had automatically performed their work, like the accurate fighting engine into which constant practice for a year and more had combined them.
Not until Sunday was Andre-Louis able to satisfy a wish which the impatience of the intervening days had converted into a yearning. Dressed with more than ordinary care, his head elegantly coiffed — by one of those hairdressers to the nobility of whom so many were being thrown out of employment by the stream of emigration which was now flowing freely — Andre-Louis mounted his hired carriage, and drove out to Meudon.
The house of the younger Kercadiou no more resembled that of the head of the family than did his person. A man of the Court, where his brother was essentially a man of the soil, an officer of the household of M. le Comte d’Artois, he had built for himself and his family an imposing villa on the heights of Meudon in a miniature park, conveniently situated for him midway between Versailles and Paris, and easily accessible from either. M. d’Artois — the royal tennis-player — had been amongst the very first to emigrate. Together with the Condes, the Contis, the Polignacs, and others of the Queen’s intimate council, old Marshal de Broglie and the Prince de Lambesc, who realized that their very names had become odious to the people, he had quitted France immediately after the fall of the Bastille. He had gone to play tennis beyond the frontier — and there consummate the work of ruining the French monarchy upon which he and those others had been engaged in France. With him, amongst several members of his household went Etienne de Kercadiou, and with Etienne de Kercadiou went his family, a wife and four children. Thus it was that the Seigneur de Gavrillac, glad to escape from a province so peculiarly disturbed as that of Brittany — where the nobles had shown themselves the most intransigent of all France — had come to occupy in his brother’s absence the courtier’s handsome villa at Meudon.
That he was quite happy there is not to be supposed. A man of his almost Spartan habits, accustomed to plain fare and self-help, was a little uneasy in this sybaritic abode, with its soft carpets, profusion of gilding, and battalion of sleek, silent-footed servants — for Kercadiou the younger had left his entire household behind. Time, which at Gavrillac he had kept so fully employed in agrarian concerns, here hung heavily upon his hands. In self-defence he slept a great deal, and but for Aline, who made no attempt to conceal her delight at this proximity to Paris and the heart of things, it is possible that he would have beat a retreat almost at once from surroundings that sorted so ill with his habits. Later on, perhaps, he would accustom himself and grow resigned to this luxurious inactivity. In the meantime the novelty of it fretted him, and it was into the presence of a peevish and rather somnolent M. de Kercadiou that Andre-Louis was ushered in the early hours of the afternoon of that Sunday in June. He was unannounced, as had ever been the custom at Gavrillac. This because Benoit, M. de Kercadiou’s old seneschal, had accompanied his seigneur upon this soft adventure, and was installed — to the ceaseless and but half-concealed hilarity of the impertinent valetaille that M. Etienne had left — as his maitre d’hotel here at Meudon.
Benoit had welcomed M. Andre with incoherencies of delight; almost had he gambolled about him like some faithful dog, whilst conducting him to the salon and the presence of the Lord of Gavrillac, who would — in the words of Benoit — be ravished to see M. Andre again.
“Monseigneur! Monseigneur!” he cried in a quavering voice, entering a pace or two in advance of the visitor. “It is M. Andre... M. Andre, your godson, who comes to kiss your hand. He is here... and so fine that you would hardly know him. Here he is, monseigneur! Is he not beautiful?”
And the old servant rubbed his hands in conviction of the delight that he believed he was conveying to his master.
Andre-Louis crossed the threshold of that great room, soft-carpeted to the foot, dazzling to the eye. It was immensely lofty, and its festooned ceiling was carried on fluted pillars with gilded capitals. The door by which he entered, and the windows that opened upon the garden, were of an enormous height — almost, indeed, the full height of the room itself. It was a room overwhelmingly gilded, with an abundance of ormolu encrustations on the furniture, in which it nowise differed from what was customary in the dwellings of people of birth and wealth. Never, indeed, was there a time in which so much gold was employed decoratively as in this age when coined gold was almost unprocurable, and paper money had been put into circulation to supply the lack. It was a saying of Andre-Louis’ that if these people could only have been induced to put the paper on their walls and the gold into their pockets, the finances of the kingdom might soon have been in better case.
The Seigneur — furbished and beruffled to harmonize with his surroundings — had risen, startled by this exuberant invasion on the part of Benoit, who had been almost as forlorn as himself since their coming to Meudon.
“What is it? Eh?” His pale, short-sighted eyes peered at the visitor. “Andre!” said he, between surprise and sternness; and the colour deepened in his great pink face.
Benoit, with his back to his master, deliberately winked and grinned at Andre-Louis to encourage him not to be put off by any apparent hostility on the part of his godfather. That done, the intelligent old fellow discreetly effaced himself.
“What do you want here?” growled M. de Kercadiou.
“No more than to kiss your hand, as Benoit has told you, monsieur my godfather,” said Andre-Louis submissively, bowing his sleek black head.
“You have contrived without kissing it for two years.”
“Do not, monsieur, reproach me with my misfortune.”
The little man stood very stiffly erect, his disproportionately large head thrown back, his pale prominent eyes very stern.
“Did you think to make your outrageous offence any better by vanishing in that heartless manner, by leaving us without knowledge of whether you were alive or dead?”
“At first it was dangerous — dangerous to my life — to disclose my whereabouts. Then for a time I was in need, almost destitute, and my pride forbade me, after what I had done and the view you must take of it, to appeal to you for help. Later...”
“Destitute?” The Seigneur interrupted. For a moment his lip trembled. Then he steadied himself, and the frown deepened as he surveyed this very changed and elegant godson of his, noted the quiet richness of his apparel, the paste buckles and red heels to his shoes, the sword hilted in mother-o’-pearl and silver, and the carefully dressed hair that he had always seen hanging in wisps about his face. “At least you do not look destitute now,” he sneered.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 361