The decline of the silk industry at Lyons had caused 20,000 hands to be stood off, and every city in the country that had catered for fashion, elegance and culture was suffering in proportion. The total bill for the practical application of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s socialist ideals was now being paid for in France by unemployment, which had reached the positively staggering figure for those days of close on three million.
For a further hour, while the little party made heavy inroads into a bottle of fifteen-year-old Calvados that Maître Blanchard had brought up from the cellar, Roger listened to a tale of woe that differed little from that which any other honest bourgeois couple in France would have told him. Knowing that they were typical of their class, he now had little doubt that both Mr. Pitt and M. de Talleyrand had been right in their contention that, if only the King could be made to give his people a lead, nine-tenths of them would support him wholeheartedly in any attempt to re-establish sane and enduring government. That the King was weak and his enemies relentless Roger knew, but he went to bed considerably cheered by what he had learned of general feeling, and next day he hoped to secure a much more intimate picture of the protagonists in this epoch-making struggle than good folk like the Blanchards were in any position to give him.
With this very necessary preliminary to his mission in mind, he had requested M. de Talleyrand to furnish him with an introduction to someone in Paris who could be trusted to give him an unbiassed account of the present situation of the Court and the potentialities of its enemies. The Bishop had responded by furnishing him with a letter to an American gentleman named Gouverneur Morris, and then described him in the following generous terms.
“He is some two years older than myself and my equal, if not my superior, in intellect. His ideals are loftier than my own, and if his outlook is not quite so wide, his talents have brought him riches, success and the respect of all who know him. He is a close friend of General Washington, and the part he played in rescuing the American Army from its desperate situation at Valley Forge during the terrible winter of ’78 was of inestimable value to his country. But it is as a lawyer and man of business that he particularly excels. While still a young man he helped to formulate the Federal Constitution. It was he who founded the first bank in the United States and projected their new currency based on a coin called the dollar. As Assistant Superintendent of Finance he came to France in ’88 and he has recently been appointed Minister. You will find him astute, remarkably well-informed and as impartial as any decent man can be, since his sympathies with the aristocrats, to whom he is by nature akin, are balanced by his American belief that all peoples should enjoy the blessings of democracy.”
“Can I speak freely to him?” Roger had enquired. “I mean, is your Grace sufficiently intimate with him to advise me to trust him completely should the need arise?”
“We are terribly intimate,” replied the Bishop with his most cynical smile; “in fact we are almost related. You will recall my dear friend Madame de Flahaut. I tell you nothing that all Paris will not be eager to inform you of when I disclose that Monsieur Morris paid his addresses to that lovely lady with a success that I found it beyond my powers to counter. At first, when the two of us met in her apartment, we behaved like bears with sore heads, and endeavoured to outsit one another; but after a few meetings we found we had so many interests in common that we formed a strong attachment, and settled down quite happily to accept in common too the smiles of our mutual inamorata.”
It was therefore with the keenest interest that on the morning of Wednesday the 20th of June Roger set out from La Belle Étoile to call upon Gouverneur Morris, but at the American Legation disappointment awaited him. He was informed by a servant that the Minister had already gone out, and that it was unlikely that he would return before nightfall. On Roger’s enquiring where he might be met with during the day, the man replied that his master usually waited upon Madame de Flahaut about noon, so Roger decided to do likewise.
To kill time he walked about the streets for a while, then went to have a look at the Tuileries. Its gardens were open to the public, except for a narrow strip along the frontage of the Palace that had been reserved for its inmates and was marked off by a length of tricolor ribbon—that method having been found a more effective barrier than any type of fence. A handful of idlers were staring up at the Palace windows, hoping that they might catch a glimpse of some member of the Royal Family; but their chance of that was remote, as during the past three years the spot on which they stood had so often been occupied by riff-raff hurling obscenities at the Queen that she and her relatives now denied themselves the small pleasure of looking out at the gardens rather than risk again being subjected to insult.
Roger then noticed that a quite considerable crowd had assembled on the north side of the gardens near the riding-school, in which the Legislative Assembly held its sittings, so he walked over to find out what had caused it to congregate. A bystander told him that today being the anniversary of that upon which the Third Estate had taken the historic “Oath of the Tennis Court” at Versailles—never to separate until the King granted a Constitution to his people—representatives of the forty-eight Sections of Paris were coming to plant a Tree of Liberty in the Palace garden. In itself that seemed to Roger a harmless enough celebration, and as it was then half-past eleven, he decided to pay his call on Madame de Flahaut.
It had been the practice of the King and Queen to allot all the accommodation not required for their own use in their many palaces to nobles of small fortune who held posts at Court, or to widows and pensioners who could ill afford houses of their own. The Comte de Flahaut belonged to the former category, and on being appointed Superintendent of the Royal Parks he had been given a suite of rooms in the Louvre; so it was to the old palace, from which France had been ruled by the Valois Kings, Henri de Navarre and Cardinal de Richelieu, that Roger now made his way.
He located the de Flahauts’ apartment on the second floor, about half-way along the block adjacent to the river, and sent in his name as the Chevalier de Breuc. It was that by which he had always been known at the French Court and he hoped now that it might arouse only memories of pleasant social occasions, but as a precaution against its having an opposite effect, he added that he had just arrived from London with messages from M. de Talleyrand.
The maid to whom he had given his name returned to say that Madame la Comtesse was at the moment in her bath but would nevertheless receive him.
In those days it was still the custom for great ladies to spend much of the day in their bedrooms. During the lengthy process of their elaborate toilettes they both discussed the morning’s news with callers and interviewed tradesmen, merely retiring behind a screen to put on their underclothes. However, Roger had never before been received by a lady with whom he had only a slight acquaintance while she was in her bath, so he was quite put to it to hide his surprise as he followed the maid down a short corridor; but as he entered a lofty bedchamber with tall windows that looked out across the Seine he saw that there was no cause for embarrassment. In the middle of the room stood a deep hip bath filled almost to the brim with a milky liquid that was covered with a froth of iridescent bubbles. The only visible parts of the lady were a pair of well-rounded shoulders, a slender neck and her head, now swathed in a turban of towelling. She was twenty-five years of age, and rightly had sufficient confidence in her striking beauty to feel no qualms about receiving a young man with her face unmade-up.
Raising a pretty arm from its submergence, she extended her wet hand for Roger to kiss, and said with a smile, “I positively could not wait a moment to have news of my dear Bishop. Pray tell me how he is enjoying London.”
Roger willingly obliged and was much relieved to note, both from her friendly manner and from a reference she made to their having met several times at Versailles three summers ago, that she evidently did not remember the circumstances in which he had left France.
After they had been talking for a few moments Ro
ger’s attention was attracted by faint noises coming from behind the silk curtains that rose to a coronet of ostrich feathers above her big bed. Seeing him glance in that direction, the Countess called out, “Charles! Stop playing with your bricks for a moment and come here, so that I may present you to M. le Chevalier.”
A remarkably handsome boy of seven emerged from behind the drapes and made his bow, but knowing the child’s history Roger was not at all surprised by his good looks. Adèle de Flahaut had been married at fifteen to the Count, who was then over fifty and near impotence from his past dissipations. They had been married by the Abbé de Talleyrand-Périgord and it was to the strikingly handsome Abbé that the beautiful but neglected young bride owed both the cultivation of her excellent mind and her son. They had made no secret of their liaison and she had even named the boy Charles, after her lover.
Like his father he was destined to become a brilliant diplomat and also, by a Queen, to have an illegitimate son, in whom were perpetuated in turn de Talleyrand’s great gifts and who, as the Duc de Morny, under the Second Empire, brought pleasure to generations still unborn by the creation of Deauville.
When Roger resumed his conversation with the Countess he commented upon Paris being much quieter than he had expected to find it in view of the recent dismissal of the Girondin ministry.
“I fear appearances are deceptive,” she replied. “Everyone is sick to death of these turmoils to which we have so long been subjected, but there are those who are determined to allow us no peace.”
With a glance round the luxuriously appointed room he said, “I am happy to observe that these years of political ferment do not seem to have materially affected the comfort in which you live, Madame.”
She shrugged her plump shoulders. “No; provided we abstain from ostentation we are rarely molested. The majority of the nobility are gone abroad, of course, but those who remain enjoy comparative peace, and within their own houses live much as before. The salons of Mesdames de Staël, de Genlis, and numerous other ladies are still well attended, the boxes at the opera are always full, and the custom of frequently dining at the houses of one’s friends has never been more than temporarily interrupted. Cards, literature and music continue to occupy a large place in the lives of people of leisure and among those who refuse to be drawn into politics, of whom there are many. Were it not for the change in fashions and the almost universal topic of how to get money safely transferred abroad, one would scarely know that there had been a Revolution.”
“Yet you fear that the present quiet is deceptive?”
“That clever American, Monsieur Gouverneur Morris, is of that opinion, and I find him an exceptionally reliable political barometer.”
“So M. de Talleyrand informed me when he very kindly furnished me with a letter of introduction to Monsieur Morris.”
She arched her eyebrows and gave him a demure smile. “No doubt then you are aware that Monsieur Morris does me the honour of waiting upon me with some frequency—every morning, in fact—and he should have been, here ere this. I cannot think what has detained him.”
Roger returned her smile and bowed. “M. de Talleyrand did infer that you, Madame, had performed the remarkable feat of simultaneously making the two most gifted men in Europe your slaves; and now, upon having the privilege of your closer acquaintance, I do not wonder at it.”
Her smile deepened and, as many a young woman had done before her, she turned her eyes up to Roger’s blue ones with just a hint of invitation. “Since you show such charming sensibility, Monsieur, the privilege is mine. You will always be welcome here while you are in Paris, and I hope that our acquaintance may ripen into friendship.”
He would have been only half a man had he not felt his pulses quicken, but he swiftly repressed the impulse to set foot on the slippery slope of a flirtation with the lovely Countess. Having thanked her, he turned the conversation back to impersonal matters by remarking:
“It is most pleasing to learn that social life in Paris has not been seriously disrupted. I had imagined that the streets would prove unsafe for people of quality after nightfall, and that gatherings of the ci-devant nobility would have been made an excuse for riots against them.”
She shook her head. “Except that they now claim to be our equals, and give themselves absurd airs on that account, the ordinary people are well behaved enough. Occasionally some Deputy who has had the courage to speak against the Jacobins is set upon and murdered, or has his house burnt down. But such acts are the work of scoundrels paid by the extremists, and are part of a deliberate campaign to intimidate the moderates in the Assembly. From time to time, too, those same extremists send their agitators with fresh lies against the King to stir up the poor wretches in the slums. For a few hours gangs of hideous-looking ruffians, and their still more awful females, parade the streets. Sometimes an incident occurs which results in bloodshed, then the mob slinks back to its dens and for a few weeks we enjoy quiet again.”
“You think then, Madame, that the present crisis will blow over in the same way?”
“The King has always given way on other matters as soon as the rioting becomes serious; so, in spite of certain fears that Monsieur Morris has recently expressed to me, I find it difficult to suppose that matters will really go differently on this occasion.”
It was at that moment that Gouverneur Morris was shown in. He was a fine-looking man with a broad forehead, aquiline nose and somewhat tightly pursed mouth. He had, Roger was somewhat surprised to see, a wooden leg, but it seemed to cause him little inconvenience as he stumped quickly forward to greet his mistress.
After laughingly chiding him for his lateness, the beauty in the bath presented Roger to him, and said, “M. de Breuc has a letter for you from our dear Bishop. Take him into the next room and give him a glass of wine while you read it, then when my woman has dried me and made me presentable you may rejoin me here.”
The American led Roger into a small boudoir, opened a cabinet that contained glasses and a variety of bottles, and invited him to choose whatever drink he preferred. Then, when he had read the letter that Roger handed him, he said briskly:
“So you are an Englishman? Well, I’ll confess I’d never have known it, and I have been living in Paris for nearly five years.”
Roger smiled. “I spent four years of my youth in France and at that time of life one is more impressionable than at any other.”
“True, and that no doubt accounts for the French mannerisms that appear so natural in you; but few Anglo-Saxons ever acquire so perfect an accent, and I envy you it.”
“You are too kind. Your own fluency leaves nothing to be desired, and one’s accent is a matter of luck rather than perseverance. It so happens that I have a good ear for languages and they have always come easily to me.”
Mr. Morris pointed at the hand with which Roger was holding his glass. “You would not have had to tell me that had I noticed your hands before. Those exceptionally long little fingers of yours tell their own tale. A long fourth finger, particularly on the right hand, is a sure sign that anyone possessing it enjoys the gift of tongues.”
“So I have heard,” agreed Roger with a smile, “and I only hope that mine will not cause me to be identified at some time when my work requires that I should remain incognito.”
The American tapped de Talleyrand’s letter. “Yes, our mutual friend infers that you are here on confidential business. He gives no details of it and I do not ask them; his assurance that you are working in the interests of peace is quite sufficient. In what way can I be of service to you?”
“I should be most grateful for any reliable information you may care to give me about the present situation—I mean information not known to the general public.”
“To a banker like myself, plain ignorance can often prove more expensive than underwriting the most crazy speculations, so I spend a lot of money learning what goes on in this city behind closed doors. What particularly do you wish to know?”
“I w
as informed in London that a fresh upheaval which would menace the continuance of the Monarchy was expected to take place here during the next few days, yet the little I have so far seen of Paris does not support that belief.”
“Nevertheless, you were rightly informed. Within a week France will be in the throes of a second Revolution.”
“One would not have thought it, seeing the apathy of the people. I was in the gardens of the Palais Royal last evening and the crowd showed not a spark of enthusiasm for the speakers who were attempting to agitate them.”
“Do not be deceived by that. The men best qualified to do so—Danton, Marat, Camille Desmoulins and Santerre—were all attending a secret meeting out at Charenton, planning to raise the Faubourgs during the night.”
“Indeed!” Roger raised his eyebrows. “It is already one o’clock and there are no signs as yet that they have succeeded.”
The American gave a grim smile and waved a hand towards the open window. “Are there not? Listen, Monsieur, and you will hear them.”
Only then did Roger become aware of a distant murmur, like the sound of surf rolling in upon a rocky shore. Instinctively they both moved over to the window and looked out. A quarter of a mile or more away to their left they could see the Pont Neuf. Its extremity on the south bank and the open space where it crossed the end of the Isle de la Cité were occupied by a seething mass of people, and the head of a closely packed column was steadily advancing across the river.
The Man who Killed the King Page 6