Ange Pitou (Volume 1)

by Alexandre Dumas

  "Pardon me, sir," said Billot, with his sound good sense; "you accused me, a short time since, of hating the Revolution, and now you are making it execrable to me."

  "But have I told you that I renounce it?"

  "Errare humanum est," murmured Pitou; "sed perseverare diabolicum."

  And he drew his feet towards him with his hands.

  "I shall, however, persevere," continued Gilbert, "for although I see the obstacles, I can perceive the end; and that end is splendid, Billot. It is not only the liberty of France that I am dreaming of; but it is the liberty of the whole world. It is not physical equality; but it is equality before the laws,—equality of rights. It is not the fraternity of our own citizens, but fraternity between all nations. I may be losing my own soul; my body may perhaps perish in the struggle," continued Gilbert, in a melancholy tone; "but it matters not. The soldier who is sent to the assault of a fortress, sees the cannon on its ramparts, sees the balls with which they are loaded, sees the match placed near the touch-hole; he sees even more than this,—he sees the direction in which they are pointed, he feels that this piece of black iron may pass through his own breast,—but he still rushes onward; the fortress must be taken. Well, we are all soldiers, Father Billot. Forward, then! and over the heaps of our dead bodies may one day march the generations of which this boy now present is the advanced guard."

  "I do not really know why you despair, Monsieur Gilbert. Is it because an unfortunate man was this day murdered on the Place de Grève?"

  "And why were you, then, so much horrified? Go, then, Billot, and cut throats also."

  "Oh, what are you now saying, Monsieur Gilbert?"

  "Zounds! a man should be consistent. You came here, all pale, all trembling,—you, who are so brave, so strong,—and you said to me, 'I am tired out.' I laughed in your face, Billot; and now that I explain to you why you were pale, why you were worn out, it is you who laugh at me in turn."

  "Speak! Speak! but first of all give me the hope that I shall return cured, consoled, to my fields."

  "Your fields! Listen to me, Billot; all our hope is there. The country—a sleeping revolution, which wakes up once in a thousand years, and gives royalty the vertigo every time it awakens—the country will wake up in its turn, when the day snail come for purchasing or conquering those wrongly acquired territories of which you just now spoke, and with which the nobility and clergy are gorged, even to choking. But to urge on the country to a harvest of ideas, it will be necessary to urge on the countrymen to the conquest of the soil. Man, by becoming a proprietor, becomes free; and in becoming free, he becomes a better man. To us, then, privileged laborers, to whom God has consented that the veil of the future shall be raised; to us, then, the fearful work, which, after giving liberty to the people, shall give them the property of the soil! Here, Billot, will be a good work, and a sorry recompense perhaps; but an active, powerful work, full of joys and vexations, of glory and calumny. The country is still lulled in a dull, impotent slumber, but it waits only to be awakened by our summons, and that new dawn shall be our work. When once the country is awakened, the sanguinary portion of our labors will be terminated, and its peaceable labors, the labors of the country, will commence."

  "What, then, do you now advise that I should do, Monsieur Gilbert?"

  "If you wish to be useful to your country, to the nation, to your brother men, to the world, remain here, Billot; take a hammer and work in this Vulcan's furnace, which is forging thunders for the whole world."

  "Remain here to see men butchered, and perhaps at last learn to butcher them myself?"

  "How so?" said Gilbert, with a faint smile. "You, Billot, become a murderer! What is it you are saying?"

  "I say that should I remain here as you request me," cried Billot, trembling with agitation,—"I say that the first man whom I shall see attaching a rope to a lamp-post, I will hang that man with these my hands."

  Gilbert's smile became more positive.

  "Well, now," said he, "I find you understand me, and now you also are a murderer."

  "Yes; a murderer of vile wretches."

  "Tell me, Billot, you have seen De Losme, De Launay, De Flesselles, Foulon, and Berthier slaughtered?"

  "Yes."

  "What epithet did those who slaughtered them apply to them?"

  "They called them wretches."

  "Oh! that is true," said Pitou; "they did call them wretches."

  "Yes; but it is I who am right, and not they," rejoined Billot.

  "You will be in the right," said Gilbert, "if you hang them; but in the wrong, if they hang you."

  Billot hung down his head under this heavy blow: then suddenly raising it again, with dignity:-—

  "Will you venture to maintain," said he, "that those who assassinate defenceless men, and who are under the safeguard of public honor,—will you maintain that they are as good Frenchmen as I am?"

  "Ah!" said Gilbert, "that is quite another question. Yes, in France we have several sorts of Frenchmen. First of all, we have the people, to which Pitou belongs, to which you belong, to which I belong; then we have the French clergy, and then the French nobility,—three classes of Frenchmen in France, each French in its own point of view; that is to say, as regards its own interests, and this without counting the King of France, who is also a Frenchman in his way. Ah, Billot, here you see, in these different modes of all these Frenchmen considering themselves French, the real secret of the Revolution. You will be a Frenchman in your own way; the Abbé Maury will be a Frenchman in his way; Mirabeau will be a Frenchman in a mode that differs from that of the Abbé Maury; and the king will be a Frenchman in another way than that of Mirabeau. Well, Billot, my excellent friend, thou man of upright heart and sound judgment, you have just entered upon the second part of the question which I am now engaged upon. Do me the pleasure, Billot, to cast your eyes on this."

  And Gilbert presented a printed paper to the farmer.

  "What is this?" asked Billot, taking the paper.

  "Read."

  "Why, you know full well that I cannot read."

  "Tell Pitou to read it, then."

  Pitou rose, and standing on tiptoe, looked at the paper over the farmer's shoulder.

  "That is not French," said he, "it is not Latin, neither is it Greek."

  "It is English," replied Gilbert.

  "I do not know English," said Pitou, proudly.

  "I do," said Gilbert, "and I will translate that paper to you; but in the first place, read the signature."

  "PITT," spelled Pitou; "what does PITT mean?"

  "I will explain it to you," replied Gilbert.

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  Chapter XIV

  The Pitts

  "PITT," rejoined Gilbert, "is the son of Pitt."

  "Well, now!" cried Pitou; "that is just as we have it in the Bible. There is then Pitt the First, and Pitt the Second?"

  "Yes, and Pitt the First, my friends—listen attentively to what I am going to tell you—"

  "We are listening," replied Billot and Pitou at the same moment.

  "This Pitt the First was during thirty years the sworn enemy of France; he combated in the retirement of his cabinet, to which he was nailed by the gout, Montealm and Vaudreuil in America, the Bailly de Suffren and D'Estaing on the seas, Noailles and Broglie on the Continent. This Pitt the First made it a principle with him that it was necessary to destroy the influence which France had gained over the whole of Europe: during thirty years he reconquered from us, one by one, all our colonies; one by one, all our factories, the whole of our possessions in the East Indies, fifteen hundred leagues of territory in Canada; and then, when he saw that France was three fourths ruined, he brought up his son to ruin her altogether."

  "Ah! ah!" exclaimed Billot, evidently much interested, "so that the Pitt we have now—"

  "Precisely," replied Gilbert, "he is the son of the Pitt whom we have had, and whom you already know, Father Billot, whom Pitou knows, whom all the universe knows; and this P
itt Junior was thirty years old this last May."

  "Thirty years old?"

  "Yes; you see that he has well employed his time, my friends. Notwithstanding his youth he has now governed England for seven years; seven years has he put in practice the theory of his father."

  "Well, then, we are likely to have him for a long time yet," said Billot.

  "And it is the more probable because the vital qualities are very tenacious among the Pitts. Let me give you a proof of it."

  Pitou and Billot indicated by a motion of their heads that they were listening with the greatest attention.

  Gilbert continued:—

  "In 1778, the father of our enemy was dying; his physicians announced to him that his life was merely hanging by a thread, and that the slightest effort would break that thread. The English Parliament was then debating on the question of abandoning the American colonies and yielding to their desire for independence, in order to put a stop to the war, which threatened, fomented as it was by the French, to swallow up the riches and all the soldiers of Great Britain. It was at the moment when Louis XVI., our good king,—he on whom the whole nation has just conferred the title of 'Father of French Liberty,'—had solemnly recognized the independence of America; and on the fields of battle in that country, and in their councils, the swords and genius of the French had obtained the mastery. England had offered to Washington—that is to say, to the chief of the insurgents—the recognition of American nationality, on condition that the new nation should ally itself with England against France."

  "But," said Billot, "it appears to me this proposition was not a decent one, to be either offered or accepted."

  "My dear Billot, this is what is called diplomacy; and in the political world ideas of this kind are much admired. Well, Billot, however immoral you may consider the matter, in spite of Washington, the most faithful of men, Americans would have been found to accede to this degrading concession to England. But Lord Chatham, the father of Pitt; the man who had been given over by the physicians, this dying man, this phantom who was already standing knee-deep in the grave, this Chatham, who it might be thought could have desired naught more on this earth but repose,—before sleeping beneath his monument, this feeble old man determined on appearing in the Parliament, where the question was about to be discussed.

  "On entering the House of Lords, he was leaning on the one side on the arm of his son, William Pitt, then only nineteen years of age, and on the other on that of his son-in-law, Lord Mahon. He was attired in his magnificent robes, which formed a derisive contrast to his own emaciated form. Pale as a spectre, his eyes half-extinguished beneath his languishing eyelids, he desired his friends to lead him to his usual seat on the bench appropriated to earls; while all the lords rose at his entrance, astounded at the unexpected apparition, and bowed to him in admiration, as the Roman Senate might have done had Tiberius, dead and forgotten, returned among them. He listened in silence and with profound attention to the speech of the Duke of Richmond, the mover of the proposition, and when he had concluded, Lord Chatham rose to reply.

  "Then this dying man summoned up strength enough to speak for three whole hours; he found fire enough within his heart to lend lightning to his eyes; in his soul he found accents which stirred up the hearts of all who heard him.

  "It is true that he was speaking against France; it is true that he was instilling into the minds of his countrymen the hatred which he felt; it is true that he had called up all his energies, all his fervent eloquence, to ruin and devour this country,—the hated rival of his own. He forbade that America should be recognized as independent; he forbade all sort of compromise; he cried, War! war! He spoke as Hannibal spoke against Rome, as Cato against Carthage! He declared that the duty of every loyal Englishman was to perish, ruined, rather than to suffer that a colony, even one single colony, should detach itself from the mother-country. Having concluded his peroration, having hurled his last threat, he fell to the ground as if thunder-stricken.

  "He had nothing more to do in this world,—he was carried expiring from the house.

  "Some few days afterwards he was dead."

  "Oh! oh!" cried both Billot and Pitou, simultaneously, "what a man this Lord Chatham was!"

  "He was the father of the young man of thirty who is now occupying our attention," pursued Gilbert. "Lord Chatham died at the age of seventy. If the son lives to the same age, we shall have to endure William Pitt for forty years longer. This is the man, Father Billot, with whom we have to contend; this is the man who now governs Great Britain; who well remembers the names of Lameth, of Rochambeau, and Lafayette; who at this moment knows the name of every man in the National Assembly; he who has sworn a deadly hatred to Louis XVI., the author of the treaty of 1778,—the man, in short, who will not breathe freely as long as there shall be a loaded musket in France and a full pocket. Do you begin to understand?"

  "I understand that he has a great detestation of France; yes, that is true, but I do not altogether see your meaning."

  "Nor I," said Pitou.

  "Well, then, read these four words." And he presented a paper to Pitou.

  "English again," cried Pitou.

  "Yes; these are the words,—Don't mind the money."

  "I hear the words, but I do not understand them," rejoined Pitou.

  Gilbert translated the words, and then:—

  "But more than this: he farther on reiterates the same advice, for he says: 'Tell them not to be sparing of money, and they need not send me any accounts.'"

  "Then they are arming," said Billot.

  "No; they are bribing."

  "But to whom is this letter addressed?"

  "To everybody and to nobody. The money which is thus given, thus strewn abroad, thus lavished, is given to peasants, to artisans, to wretches,—to men, in short, who will degrade our Revolution."

  Father Billot held down his head. These words explained many things.

  "Would you have knocked down De Launay with the butt-end of a musket, Billot?"

  "No."

  "Would you have killed Flesselles by firing a pistol at him?"

  "No."

  "Would you have hanged Foulon?"

  "No."

  "Would you have carried the still bleeding heart of Berthier and placed it on the table of the electors?"

  "Infamy!" exclaimed Billot. "On the contrary, however guilty this man may have been, I would have allowed myself to be torn to pieces could I have saved him by it; and the proof of this is that I was wounded in defending him, and that but for Pitou, who dragged me to the riverside—"

  "Oh! that is true," cried Pitou; "but for me, Father Billot would have had but a bad time of it."

  "Well, then, see you now, Billot, there are many men who would act as you have done, when they feel that they have some one to assist them near them, and who, on the contrary, if abandoned to bad examples, become wicked, then ferocious, then frenzied,—then, when the evil is done, why, 'tis done."

  "But, in short," observed Billot, objectingly, "admitting that Mr. Pitt, or rather his money, had something to do with the death of Flesselles, of Foulon, and of Berthier, what would he gain by it?"

  Gilbert began to laugh with that inaudible laugh which astonishes the simple, but which makes the thinking shudder.

  "What would he gain by it!" he exclaimed, "can you ask that?"

  "Yes, I do ask it."

  "I will tell you. It is this; you were much pleased with the Revolution, were you not,—you who walked in blood to take the Bastille?"

  "Yes, I was pleased with it."

  "Well! you now like it less; well! now you long for Villers-Cotterets, your farm, the quietude of your plain, the shades of your great forests."

  "Frigida Tempe," murmured Pitou.

  "Oh, yes, you are right," sighed Billot.

  "Well, then, you, Father Billot; you, a farmer; you, the proprietor of land; you, a child of the Île-de-France, and consequently a Frenchman of the olden time,—you represent the third orde
r; you belong to that which is called the majority. Well, then, you are disgusted."

  "I acknowledge it."

  "Then the majority will become disgusted as you are."

  "And what then?"

  "And you will one day open your arms to the soldiers of the Duke of Brunswick or of Mr. Pitt, who will come to you in the name of those two liberators of France to restore wholesome doctrine."

  "Never!"

  "Pshaw! wait a little."

  "Flesselles, Berthier, and Foulon were at bottom villains," observed Pitou.

  "Assuredly, as Monsieur de Sartines and Monsieur de Maurepas were villains; as Monsieur d'Argenson and Monsieur de Philippeaux were before them; as Monsieur Law was; as the Leblancs, the De Paris, the Duverneys were villains; as Fouquet was; as Mazarin was also; as Semblancey, as Enguerrand de Marigny were villains; as Monsieur de Brieune is towards Monsieur de Calonne; as Monsieur de Calonne is towards Monsieur de Necker; as Monsieur de Necker will be to the administration which we shall have in two years."