The Rising Storm

by Dennis Wheatley

  My apartments are above these. Please go to them. Show this note to my maid and she will let you in. Wait there until I can join you.

  Unhurriedly, so as not to attract attention, he followed the directions he had been given. In the ante-room he found an elderly maid busy with some mending. At sight of the note she led him through to a salon, and asked him to take a seat by the fire.

  After about ten minutes the Princess de Lamballe came in, and locked the door of the ante-chamber behind her. With no more than a smile in response to Roger’s bow, she walked across the salon to a door at its far end, and disappeared through it. Wondering what these mystifications portended, Roger sat down again. He had not long to wait for an answer. Within two minutes the door opened and the Princess came out, but this time she was preceded by the Queen. Evidently the two sets of apartments were connected by a secret staircase in the thickness of the wall, and the Queen was now coming up to Madame de Lamballe’s rooms whenever she wanted to prevent it becoming known that she was giving anyone a private audience.

  Roger thought her looking somewhat better than when he had last spoken to her; but she had aged a lot in the past few months, and he noticed a slight nervous twitching of her hands as she asked him about his mission.

  With a cheerful smile he at once assured her that it had been successful and presented the letter he had brought her from her sister; so he felt a natural disappointment when she said, with a sad shake of her head:

  “Alas, Monsieur, I fear you have had your long journey to no purpose. At first the King was in favour of my idea, but he has since decided against it, and he now feels that it would be both impolitic and wrong to send the Dauphin from us.”

  Roger was silent for a moment, then he said: “Forgive me, Madame, but His Majesty has frequently been known to change his mind on other matters; is there not a possibility that he will do so on this?”

  “I fear not,” she replied unhappily. “Since your departure we have enjoyed a reasonable tranquillity. How long it will last it is impossible to say; but His Majesty fears that the moment it became known that we had smuggled the Dauphin out of the country another outbreak of violence would result.”

  “ ’Tis a risk, Madame, but one that I should have thought well worth taking,” put in the Princess. “Further outbreaks may occur in any case, and if you take this chance you would at least have the satisfaction of knowing His Highness to be safe; whereas, if you do not send him away now it may prove impossible to do so later.”

  “Oh, dear Lamballe, how I agree!” exclaimed the Queen. “ ’Tis my worse nightmare that a time may come when we shall be still more closely guarded, and those furies breaking in again will do my son a violence. But His Majesty has ruled that even our child is no longer our own to do with as we will. Like everything else I once thought was ours, he maintains that we hold the Dauphin in trust for the Nation, and that to send him away would be to wrong the people. If there be reason in that, then my mother’s heart makes me blind to it; yet the King has so many cares that, even in this, I could not bring myself to argue with him.”

  Roger would have liked to suggest to the Queen that the best thing she could do was to box her stupid husband’s ears, and tell him that when it came to the safety of her son she would not stand for any more of his pathetic day-dreaming; but, since such sound comment was impossible, he remained silent until she asked him how he had found Queen Caroline.

  For some twenty minutes he gave her the news from Naples, then she took a paper from her pocket and, handing it to him, said:

  “This, Mr. Brook, is to cover the expenses of your journey. And, believe me, because it can have no sequel, I am none the less grateful to you for undertaking it. For what little it is worth in these sad times you may always count upon my friendship.”

  Having murmured his thanks and kissed her hand, he watched her leave the room by its far doorway with the Princess; then, a few minutes later, Madame de Lamballe returned and let him out into the ante-room. He did not look at the paper the Queen had given him until he was outside the palace, but when he did he was pleasantly surprised. It was a draft on Thellusson’s Bank for 500 louis, and his journey to Naples had cost him barely a third of that sum.

  Now that Roger was once more free of the Queen’s business he felt that he must try to make up for lost time in cultivating the most prominent figures in the National Assembly; so he began to spend several hours each day in the Riding School of the Tuileries, where it now met. As he already knew quite a number of the deputies it was not difficult for him to get himself introduced to others that he wished to meet, and he soon had acquaintances in all parties.

  In the late summer, during the first few weeks that the Three Estates had sat as one body, the Assembly had naturally resolved itself into two parties: those who had been in favour of joint sittings and those who had opposed them. The more reactionary nobles and clergy, who composed the latter, had taken little part in the debates, treated the deliberations with cynical contempt and, wherever possible, sabotaged the proceedings. But in the autumn, realising the futility of such a policy, the more sensible among them had begun to play a more constructive part, and this had resulted in the whole body splitting into a great number of small parties, all varying slightly in their views and ranging from absolutists to outright republicans.

  The Extreme Right was led by d’Espréménil and the Vicomte de Mirabeau, brother of the great orator. The Main Right was a slightly larger body and possessed two of the best statesmen in the Assembly: the Vicomte de Cazalès, a young Captain in the Queen’s Dragoons who had emerged as a clear-thinking and lucid speaker, and the Abbé Maury, an extraordinary skilful and subtle debator. The Right Centre, which aimed at a Constitutional Monarchy on English lines, was a loose but still more numerous party. It included many of the most respected members of the original Third Estate, Mounier and Malouet among them; also the Counts Lally-Tollendal and Clermont-Tonnerre, with most of the other Liberal nobles.

  The Left, which desired a strictly limited monarchy, was nebulous but powerful in numbers, as it consisted of the larger part of the deputies elected to the Third Estate and the majority of the curés who had been elected to the First. The Protestant pastor, Rabaut-Saint-Étienne, Duport, Alexander Lameth, Barnave, Camus, Le Chapelier, Lafayette, Bailly and the Abbé Sieyès were all members of it, but a number of them were now gravitating towards the Extreme Left, which consisted of a small group of enragés, as they were called, led by Pétion and a dry little lawyer from Arras named Maximilien Robespierre.

  Roger found that even his three weeks’ absence from Paris had brought about a marked change in the character of the Assembly. As early as August, the surrender of the King after the taking of the Bastille and the “Great Fear” had led to a number of the most reactionary among the nobles who sat for the Second Estate following the Comte d’Artois, and other Princes, into exile. The attack on Versailles and removal of the Royal Family to Paris in October had greatly accentuated the movement, so that over two hundred deputies, all of whom were strongly Monarchist in principle, had now abandoned their seats and gone abroad, thus enormously weakening the Right and Right Centre.

  Moreover it was apparent that the mob that daily filled the public galleries of the Assembly now exercised an even greater influence on its deliberations than before. The Riding School was a somewhat smaller chamber than the Salle des Menus Plaisirs in which the Assembly had sat while at Versailles, but, owing to the decrease in the number of deputies that now attended, the accommodation for the public was as commodious as before. In consequence, the deputies of the Right were constantly exposed to methodical terrorism from the supporters of the Left, both in the chamber and out of it. In several instances members who spoke strongly in support of the monarchy were threatened with having their houses burnt down, and all those who held moderate opinions found it necessary to go about armed. Even the highly respected Malouet never attended a sitting without a brace of pistols in his belt; and Mounier,
wearied out with the threats and heckling of the people to secure whose liberties he had done so much, had resigned in disgust and joined the exiles abroad.

  This recent abandonment of the struggle by Mounier struck Roger as a particularly alarming portent, as the deputy for Grenoble could be considered, even more than Lafayette, Bailly or Mirabeau, as the Father of the Revolution. As far back as June 1788 the noblesse of Grenoble had held a consultation with local representatives of the other Orders and decided that, in view of the troubled state of the country, the ancient Estates of Dauphiné should be revived. Without the royal consent elections had been held, and deputies nominated to sit in a Provincial Assembly to consist of the Three Estates deliberating together, and in which the representatives of the Third Estate equalled the total of the other two.

  The Government had sent the Marshal de Vaux with troops to put a stop to these unorthodox proceedings, but he had found opinion in the Province so firmly united that he had been forced to compromise, exacting only the concession that, instead of the Assembly sitting in the Provincial capital, it should meet at the nearby town of Vizille. And there it had met, ten months before the States General assembled at Versailles, and already constituted on a basis that it later took the States General two months to achieve. The mainspring of this extraordinary innovation in the Government of the ancient Monarchy of France had been the young and energetic lawyer Jean-Joseph Mounier, who was chosen Secretary to the Assembly and drafted most of its resolutions. Moreover, when the States General met in the following year it had naturally adopted most of the precedents set by the Assembly of Vizille as the only example of democratic government then existing in the country, and recognised Mounier as the leading authority on parliamentary procedure.

  Yet now, only seven months after the States General had assembled, such an iconoclastic fervour had seized on the mentality of the people, and so intolerant had they become of all moderate opinion, that this great champion of democracy had despaired of seeing a stable Constitution emerge from the state of semi-anarchy to which the surrender of the royal authority had reduced France. He had been driven into exile amidst the hoots and menaces of the scum of the faubourgs, who used the cry of “liberty” as an excuse to set all law at defiance, and whose sole object was to raise riots which would enable them to plunder the houses of the richer citizens.

  This question of formulating a Constitution had naturally been one of the first matters with which the Assembly had concerned itself. The King had long been willing to grant one and, if he had had the courage of his convictions, he could have saved himself infinite trouble by doing so in ’87 or ’88. Then, practically any Charter ensuring the people reasonable liberties would have put an end to all serious agitations for reform. Even after the States General met, had he possessed an ounce of resolution he could still have taken matters out of their hands, and by giving the people a permanent voice in the government of the country retained the whole executive power himself. But his policy of drift had now landed him in a situation where he was not to be allowed any say in the matter at all; and as the year ’89 drew to a close a succession of debates in the Assembly showed an ever-increasing tendency to leave the King as nothing but a puppet to be paraded for the amusement of the people on State occasions.

  Owing to the innumerable problems that confronted the Assembly, and the impossibility of its hearing all the deputies who wished to speak, it had adopted the wise course of appointing a number of Committees to look into various matters and report upon them. On the very day of the fall of the Bastille a Committee had been set up to draft the Constitution, its members being: the Archbishop of Bordeaux, the Bishop of Autun, Counts Lally-Tollendal and Clermont-Tonnerre; Mounier, Sieyès, Le Chapelier and Bergasse. They had laboured for two months, but by the time they produced their recommendations public opinion had so far outstripped them that all the most important clauses in their draft were rejected. Another Committee had then been appointed, this time consisting entirely of members of the Third Estate with the one exception of the Bishop, and, gifted as Monsieur de Talleyrand-Périgord might be, he could hardly be considered as a typical representative of the clergy. He had in fact, two days before Roger left for Naples, actually proposed and carried through the Assembly a motion that all Church property should be confiscated and sold for the benefit of the State.

  Roger was greatly interested in this question of the Constitution, because he was shrewd enough to see that, in its final form, it would decree the manner in which all vital decisions were to be taken by the French Government in future. If France was to continue as a monarchy—and that was clearly still the wish of 95 per cent, of her population—the King must be left with some functions, otherwise it was pointless to retain him. But would he be left, for example, with the power to make war or peace without the consent of the Assembly? That was the type of knowledge which, should a sudden international crisis arise, would prove invaluable to Mr. Pitt; and it was Roger’s business to obtain it.

  In the last days of November and the first half of December Roger dined or supped with a number of interesting people—the Monarchist leader Cazalès, the clever anti-Monarchist lawyer Barnave and the fiery young journalist Camille Desmoulins among them—but he had been disappointed in his efforts to secure more than a few words at any one time with his old friend, the now extremely busy Bishop of Autun. As de Périgord was one of the only three men who had served on the Committee of the Constitution since its inception, and therefore in an almost unique position to talk about it with authority, Roger decided that he must somehow get him to give him an evening. So one morning he tackled the lame prelate as he was about to enter the Chamber, and said with a smile:

  “Monsieur l’ Êvéque, I never thought I would have to reproach you on the score of hospitality; yet I feel the time has come when I have some right to do so.”

  “Indeed!” exclaimed the Bishop, raising a quizzical eyebrow. “And why, pray, may I ask?”

  “It was June when you promised to arrange for me to meet Monsieur de Mirabeau at dinner, and here we are in December; but you have not done so yet.”

  “Well, well!” De Périgord murmured. “The distractions of a changing world must serve as the excuse for my forgetfulness. But by a lucky chance de Mirabeau is pledged to dine with me on Saturday next. We have some private business we wish to discuss after dinner; but if you would not take it ill of me in asking you to make some excuse to leave us early I should be delighted if you will join us for the meal.”

  Roger was enchanted with this opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. He had met the Comte de Mirabeau several times in ’87, at the famous breakfasts that de Périgord used to give for talented men of Liberal views; but in the present year he had found the now famous deputy much too occupied to acknowledge their acquaintance when they met by more than a smile and a brief greeting. It had been only as an excuse to secure a good long talk with de Périgord that he had mentioned de Mirabeau’s name, but Fortune was now favouring him with the chance to talk on terms of intimacy with both these intellectual giants at the same sitting.

  On the Saturday, feeling that his promise to leave soon after dinner justified his arriving early, he was at the wicket gate of the charming little house at Passy by a quarter to four. The first snow of the year had fallen, but the garden path was neatly swept; and within a few moments of knocking on the door he was standing in front of the bright wood-fire in the sitting-room.

  Having greeted his host he remarked: “Is it not positively fantastic to consider the changes that have occurred in France since I was last in this room; and that less than eight months ago?”

  De Périgord smiled. “At least there no longer exists a Bastille for the Queen to pop you into, and lettres de cachet are quite gone out of fashion.”

  Roger suppressed a start. He had completely forgotten the lie he had told on his last visit there; but fortunately the Bishop failed to notice his guilty flush, as he was fiddling with his snuff-box before of
fering it. As he did so, he went on: “Joking apart, though, there have been changes enough, and in my opinion far too many.”

  “It surprises me to hear you say so,” Roger replied, accepting a pinch with a little bow. “I thought you firmly set upon overturning the old order.”

  “Rehabilitating rather than overturning,” corrected de Périgord mildly. “I pride myself somewhat upon being a realist; and it was clear to most of us who used to meet here at my little breakfasts in the old days that the Court were living in a land of make-believe. I wished to bring them down to earth with a full realisation of their responsibilities; but it was far from my desire to witness the degradation to which the monarchy has been subject in these past few months.”

  “Since we have always spoken frankly,” Roger said a little diffidently, “you will forgive me if I remark that Your Grace’s name ranks high among those who have brought the degradation of the Monarch about.”

  De Périgord gave him a swift calculating look. “That is fair comment upon my public acts. My only desire is to serve France, and if I am to do so I must continue to swim with the tide. But my private hopes for the outcome of events in this momentous year were very different. As far back as last July, on the day the Bastille fell, so perturbed was I by the course matters were taking that I went secretly, in the middle of the night, to the Comte d’Artois and woke him in his bed.”

  For a moment the Bishop paused, then, with a flutter of his lace handkerchief, he went on: “For the King I have nothing but contempt, and I regard the Comte de Provence as a treacherous and pompous fool; but I am not altogether without respect for the younger of the three brothers. I told His Highness that, in my opinion, owing to the King’s mental cowardice, matters had already been allowed to go far beyond the point at which all reasonable reformers aimed, and that the monarchy was in grave danger. I added that the only way to save it was for the King to dissolve the National Assembly—by force if need be—and to march on Paris with his troops. I implored him to tell the King that this was his last chance; and that if he failed to act, in another twenty-four hours it would be too late. His Highness was so impressed with my earnestness that he at once got up, dressed and went to the King. No doubt His Majesty made his usual promise that he would ‘think it over’. In any case, he did not take my advice; but it is not my fault that he is where he is now.”