Читать книгу: «Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine – Volume 55, No. 341, March, 1844», страница 14

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN

PART IX

 
"Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind,
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in the pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?"
 

SHAKSPEARE.

The market-place was lighted up, and filled with dragoons. Leaving my hulans under cover of a dark street, and riding forward to reconnoitre, I saw with astonishment the utter carelessness with which they abandoned themselves to their indulgences in the midst of an irritated population. Some were drinking on horseback; some had thrown themselves on the benches of the market, and were evidently intoxicated. The people stood at the corners of the streets looking on, palpably in terror, yet as palpably indignant at the outrage of the military. From the excessive blaze in some of the windows, and the shrieks of females, I could perceive that plunder was going on, and that the intention was, after having ransacked the place, to set it on fire. Yet a strong body of cavalry mounted in the middle of the square, and keeping guard round a waggon on which a guillotine had been already erected, still made me feel that an attack would be hopeless. I soon saw a rush of the people from one of the side streets; a couple of dragoon helmets were visible above the crowd; and three or four carts followed, filled with young females in white robes and flowers, as if dressed for a ball. I gazed intently, to ascertain the meaning of this strange and melancholy spectacle. At this moment I felt my horse's bridle pulled, and saw the old noble at his head. "Now or never!" he cried, in a voice almost choked with emotion. "Those are destined for the guillotine. Barbarians! brigands!—they will murder my Amalia." He sank before me. "What! is this an execution?" I exclaimed. His answer was scarcely above a whisper, for he seemed fainting. "The villains have been sent," said he, "to burn the town; they have seized those children of our best families, compelled them to dress as they were dressed for the Prussian ball, and are now about to murder them by their accursed guillotine." Pointing to one lovely girl, who, pale as death, stood in the foremost of those vehicles of death, he exclaimed "Amalia! O, my Amalia!" The cart was already within a few feet of the scaffold when I gave the word to my troopers. The brave fellows answered my "Forward!" with a shout, charged sabre in hand, and in an instant had thrown themselves between the victims and the scaffold. Their escort, taken completely by surprise, was broken at the first shock; we dashed without loss of time on the squadrons scattered round the market, and swept it clear of them. Surprised, intoxicated, and unacquainted with our force—which they probably thought to be the advance of the whole Prussian cavalry—after having lost many men, for the peasantry showed no mercy on the dismounted, the regiment turned at full gallop to the open country. The townspeople now performed their part. The victims were hurried away by their families, among a storm of lamentations and rejoicings, tears and kisses. The old noble's daughter, half dead, was carried off in her father's arms, with a thousand benedictions on me. The guillotine was hewn down with a hundred axes, and I saw the fragments burning in the square. Its waggon was made to serve its country as a portion of a barricade; and with every vehicle, wheeled or unwheeled, which could be rolled out, the entrance to the streets was fortified with the national rapidity in any deed, good or ill, under the stars.

After having appeased our hunger and that of our famishing horses, and being offered all the purses, which the French dragoons, however, had lightened nearly to the last coin, we finished the exploit by a general chant in honour of the ladies, and marched on our route, followed by the prayers of the whole community. This ended the only productive skirmish of the retreat. It fed us, broke the monotony of the march, and gave us something to talk of—and the soldier asks but little more. A gallant action had certainly been done; not the less gallant for its being a humane one; and even my bold hulans gave me credit for being a "smart officer," a title of no slight value in their dashing service.

Yet what, as the poet Saadi says, is fortune but a peacock "a showy tail on a frightful pair of legs?" Our triumph was to be followed by a reverse. The burgundy and champagne of the old count's cellar had made us festive, and our voices were heard along the road with a gaiety imprudent in a hostile land. The sound of a trumpet in our front brought us to our senses and a dead stand. But we were in a vein of heroism and instead of taking to our old hussar habits, and slipping round the enemy's flanks, we determined to cut our way through them, if they had the whole cavalry of France as their appui. The word was given, and the spur carried us through a strong line of cavalry posted across the road. The moon had just risen enough to show that there was a still stronger line a few hundred yards beyond, which it would be folly to touch. There was now no resource but to return as we went, which we did at full speed, and again broke up our antagonists. But again we saw squadron after squadron blocking up the road. All was now desperate. But Frederick's law of arms was well known—"the officer of cavalry who waits to be charged, must be broke." We made a plunge at our living circumvallation; but the French dragoons had now learned common sense—they opened for us—and when we were once fairly in, enveloped us completely; it was then a troop to a brigade; fifty jaded men and horses to fifteen hundred fresh from camp. What happened further I know not. I saw for a minute or two a great deal of pistol firing and a great deal of sabre clashing; I felt my horse stagger under me, at the moment when I aimed a blow at a gigantic fellow covered all over with helmet and mustache; a pistol exploded close at my ear as I was going down, and I heard no more.

On opening my eyes again, I found the scene strangely altered. I was lying in a little chamber hung round with Parisian ornament—a sufficient contrast to a sky dark as pitch, or only illumined by carbines and the sparkles of sabres delving at each other. I was lying on an embroidered sofa—an equally strong contrast to my position under the bodies of fallen men and the heels of kicking horses. A showy Turkish cloak, or robe de chambre, had superseded my laced jacket, purple pantaloons, and hussar boots. I was completely altered as a warrior; and, from a glimpse which I cast on a mirror, surrounded with gilt nymphs and swains enough to have furnished a ballet, I saw in my haggard countenance, and a wound, which a riband but half concealed, across my forehead, that I was not less altered as a man.

All round me looked so perfectly like the scenes with which I had been familiar in my romance-reading days, that, bruised and feeble as I was, I almost expected to find my pillow attended by some of those slight figures in long white drapery with blue eyes, which of old ministered to so many ill-used knights and exhausted pilgrims. But my reveries were broken up by a rough voice in the outer chamber insisting on an entrance into mine, and replied to by a weak and garrulous female one, refusing the admission. The dialogue was something of this order—

"Strong or weak, well or ill, able or not able, I must send him, before twelve o'clock this night, to Paris."

"But the poor gentleman's wounds are still unhealed."

"Still he must set out. The 'malle poste' will be at the door; and, if he had fifty wounds on him, he must go. The marquis is halfway to Paris by this time; perhaps more than halfway to the guillotine."

This was followed by a burst of sobs and broken exclamtions from the female, whom I discovered, by her sorrowing confessions, to have been a nurse in the family.

"Well," was the ruffian's reply; "women of all ages are fools: what is it to you whether this young fellow is shot or hanged? He was taken in arms against the Republic—one and indivisible. All the enemies of France must perish!"

The old woman now partially opened the door, to see whether I slept; and I closed my eyes, for the purpose of hearing all that was to be heard without interruption. The speaker, whom I alternately took for the gendarme of the district, and the executioner, gave went to his swelling soul in the national style.

"What! leave me! leave Jean Jacques Louis Gilet in charge of this wretched aristocrat, while I should be marching with my battalion, and at its head too, if merit meets its reward, to sweep the foes of the Republic from the face of the earth. No; I shall not remain in this paltry place, solicitor of a village, when I ought to be on the highest seat of justice—or playing the part of arresting aristocrats, when I might be commandant of a brigade, marching over the bodies of the crowned tyrants of the earth to glory!"

As his harangue glowed, his pace quickened, and his voice grew more vehement; at length, probably impatient of the time which lay between him and the first offices of the Republic, he overpowered the resistance of the nurse, and rushed into the chamber. Throwng himself into a theatrical attitude before a mirror—for what Frenchman ever passes one without a glance of happy recognition?—"Rise, aristocrat!" he cried, in the tone of Talma calling up the shade of Caesar. "Rise, and account to the world for your crimes against the liberty of man!"

I looked with such surprise on this champion of the sons of Adam—a little meagre creature, who seemed to be shaped on the model of one of his own pens, stripped, withered, and ink-dried—that I actually burst into laughter. His indignation rose, and, pulling out a pistol with one hand, and a roll of paper from his bosom with the other, he presented them together. I perceived, as I lay on my pillow, that the pistol was without a lock, and thus was comforted; but the paper was of a more formidable description. It was the famous decree of "Fraternization," by which France pronounced the fall of her own monarchy, declared "that she would grant succour to every people who wished to recover their liberty," and commanded her generals "to aid all such, and to defend all citizens who might be troubled in the cause of freedom."

This paper indeed startled me; it was the consummation which I had dreaded so long. I saw at once that France, in those wild words, had declared war against every throne in Europe, and that we were now beginning the era of struggle and suffering which Mordecai's strong sense had predicted, and of which no human sagacity could foresee the end. My countenance probably showed the impression which this European anathema had made upon me; for Monsieur Gilet became more heroic than ever, tore his grizzled curls, throwing aside his pistol, which he had at length discovered to be hors de combat, and drawing the falchion which clattered at his heels, and was nearly as long as himself, flourished it in quick march backward and forward before the mirror—that mirror never forgotten!—in all the whirlwind of his rage, and panted for the conquest of "perfidious Albion," the "traitor" Pitt, and the whole brood of hoary power. I was too feeble to turn him out of the room, and too contemptuous to reply. But his overthrow was not the further off. The old nurse, who, old as she was, still retained some of the sinews and all the irritability of a stout Champenoise peasant, roused by his insults to the aristocracy, one of whom she probably regarded herself, from having lived so long under their roof, watched her opportunity, made a spring at him like a wild-cat, wrested the sabre from his hand, and, grasping the struggling and screaming little functionary in her strong arms, carried him like a child out of the room.

She then returned, and having locked the door to prevent his second inroad, sat down by the side of my couch, and, with the usual passion of women after strong excitement, burst into exclamations and tears. What I could collect from her broken narrative, was little more than the commonplace of national misery in that fearful time. She had been a servant in the family of the nobleman whose daughter I had saved from death. She had been the nurse of the young countess; and all the blessings that sorrow and gratitude ever gathered together, could not be exceeded by the praises which she poured upon my head. It had been rumoured in the town that I was attacked and killed by a body of cavalry sent to revenge the rout of their comrades. And the Marquis Lanfranc—I now first learned the name of my noble entertainer—had gone forth to look for my remains in the field. I was found still breathing, and to avoid further danger was carried to this dwelling, a hunting-lodge in the heart of the forest; there I had been attended by the family physician only, and, after a week of insensibility, had given signs of recovery. The marquis's humanity had brought evil on himself. His visits to the lodge had been remarked, and on this very morning he had been arrested, and conveyed with his daughter, in a carriage escorted by gendarmes to the capital. My detection followed of course; papers found on my person had proved that I was an agent of England; and the officious M. Gilet had spent the morning in exhibiting to the peasantry of the neighbourhood the order of the "Committee of Public Safety," a name which froze the blood, to take me under his charge, and conduct me forthwith to their tribunal. I tell all this in my own way; for the dame's sighs, sobs, and vehement indignation, would have defied all record.

My prospect was now black enough, for justice was a word unheard of in the present condition of things; and my plea of being an Englishman, and in the civil service of my country, would have been a death-warrant. I must acknowledge, too, that I had fairly thrown it away by my adoption of the Prussian sabre. I might well be now in low spirits; for the guillotine was crushing out life at that moment in every province of France, and the thirst of public curiosity was to be fed by nothing but blood. Yet, even in that moment, let me give myself credit for the recollection, my first enquiry was for the fate of my squadron. The old woman could tell me but little on the subject; but that little was consolatory. The French troopers, who had come back triumphing into the town, had not brought any Prussian prisoners: two or three foreigners, who had lost their horses, were sheltered in her master's stables until they could make their escape; and of them she had heard no more. The truth is, that nothing is more difficult in war than to catch a hussar who understands his business; and the probability was, that the chief part of them had slipped away, leaving the French to sabre each other in the dark. The fall of my horse had brought me down, otherwise I might have escaped the shot which stunned me, and been at that hour galloping to Berlin.

Monsieur Gilet, with some of the civic authorities, paid me a second visit in the evening, to prepare me for my journey. To me it was become indifferent whether I died in the carriage or by the edge of the guillotine; the journey was short in either case, and the shorter and sooner the better. I answered none of their interrogatories; told them I was at their disposal; directed the old woman to pack up whatever travelling matters remained to me, and to remember me to her master and mistress, if she ever should see them in this world; shook her strong old hand, and bade God bless her. In return, she kissed me on both cheeks, whispered a thousand benedictions, and left the room violently sobbing; yet with a parting glance at Monsieur Gilet and his collaborateurs, so mingled of wrath and ridicule, that it was beyond all my deciphering.

 
"Time and the hour run through the longest day,"
 

says the great poet; and, with the coming of midnight, a chaise de poste drew up at the door. As I was a prisoner of importance, M. Gilet was not suffered to take all the honour of my introduction to the axe on himself; and the mayor and deputy-mayor of the district insisted on this opportunity of making themselves known to the supreme Republic. They mounted the box in front, a couple of gendarmes sat behind, M. Gilet took his seat at my side, and, with an infinite cracking of whips, we rushed out upon the causeway.

I soon discovered that my companion was by no means satisfied with existing circumstances. The officiousness of the pair of mayors prodigiously displeased him. He broke forth—

"See these two beggars," he exclaimed, "pretending to patriotism! They have no energy, no courage, no civism. Why, you might have remained for a twelvemonth under their very nostrils before they would have found you out. Gilet is the man for the service of his country." Merely to stop the torrent of his complainings, I asked him some vague questions relative to the nobleman whom I was now following to Paris. But the patriot was not to be moved from his topic.

"Hah! Citizen Lanfranc. All is over with him. He once held his head high enough, but it will soon be as low as ever it was high. Yet I could have forgiven his aristocracy, if he had not put these two 'chiens' above me."

The position in which the mayor and his deputy sat, on the box of the chaise, continually presenting them to the eye of my companion, kept his choler peculiarly active.

"One of these fellows," he exclaimed, "was the Marquis's cook, another his perruquier! I was his tailor. Every man of taste and talent knows the superiority of my profession; for what is the first of noblemen without elegance of costume, or what indeed would man himself be without my art, the noblest and the earliest art of mankind? And yet he made these two 'brigands' mayor and deputy—peste! I did my duty. I denounced him on the spot. I did more. The aristocrat had a faction in the town. It was filled with his dependents. In fact, it had been built on his grounds, and tenanted by the old hangers-on of the family. So, to make a clear stage, I denounced the town." He clapped his hands with exultation at this civic triumph.

My recollection of the miseries which his malice had caused roused me into wrath, and, rash as the act was, I grasped him by the collar, with the full intent of throwing the little writhing wretch out of the window; but, while I was lifting him from the seat to which he clung screaming for help, and had already forced him halfway outside, a shot whistled close by the head of the postilion, which brought him to a full stop. "Mon Dieu!—Brigands!" exclaimed Monsieur Gilet; and, dropping back into the carriage, attempted to make a screen of my body by slipping his adroitly behind me. Two or three more discharges rattled through the trees, followed by a rush of peasants, who unceremoniously knocked down the two officials in front, and began a general scuffle with the gendarmes. The night was so dark, that I could discover nothing of the mêlée but by the blaze of the fusils. All, however, was quiet in a few moments, by the disappearance of the gendarmes, and the complete capture of the convoy—M. Gilet, mayors, and all. Whether we had fallen into the hands of highwaymen, or of stragglers from the French army, was doubtful for a while, as not a syllable was spoken, nor a sound uttered, except by the unhappy functionaries, who grumbled prodigiously as they were dragged along through "rough and smooth, moss and mire," and whose pace was evidently quickened by many a kick and blow of the fusil. This was a rude march for me, too, with my unhealed wound, and my week's sojourn in bed; but I was treated, if not with tenderness, without incivility, while my compagnons de voyage were insulted with every contemptuous phrase in a vocabulary at least as rich in those matters as any other in Europe. At length, after about an hour's rapid movement, we reached an open ground, and the door of one of the wide, old, staring, yet not uncomfortable farmhouses which are to be found in the northern provinces of France.

Signs of comfort within were visible even at a distance, and the light of a huge wood fire had been seen for the last quarter of an hour gleaming through the woods, and leaving us in doubt whether we were approaching a horde of gipsies, or about to realize the classic scenes of Gil Blas.

But it was only a farm-house after all. The good dame of the house, with an enormous cap, enormous petticoats, enormous earrings, and all the glaring good-humour of a countenance of domestic plenty and power, came to meet us on the threshold; and her reception of me was ardent, to the very verge of stranglulation. Nothing could exceed her rapture at the sight of me, or the fierceness of her embraces, except her indignation at the sight of my traveling companions. Her disgust at the mayor and his deputy—and certainly after their night trip they were not figures to charm the eye—was pitched in the highest key of scorn, so as to be surpassed only by the torrent of contempt which her well-practised elocution poured upon the "traître tailleur." I really believe, that, if she could have boiled him in the huge soup-kettle which bubbled upon the fire, without spoiling our supper, she would have flung him in upon the spot. The peasants who had captured us—bold, tall fellows, well dressed and well armed with cutlass and fusil, in the style of the gardes-de-chasse—could scarcely be kept from taking them out to the next tree, to make marks of them; and it was probably by my intercession alone that they were consigned to an outer house for the night. How the scene was to end with me, I knew not; though the jovial visage of my protectress showed me that I was secure. But the prisoners had no sooner been flung out of the door than I was ushered into an inner room, prepared with somewhat more of attention; where, to my great surprise and delight, the Marquis Lanfranc came forward to shake my hand, and, with a thousand expressions of gratitude, made me known to his daughter. The adventure was of the simplest order. The arrest of the Marquis was, of course, known in an instant, and a party of his foresters had immediately determined to take the law into their own hands—had posted themselves on the road by which his carriage was to pass, and had released him without difficulty. My release was merely a sequel to the drama. I had been left in the hunting-lodge by its owner, under the impression that an individual who could not be moved without hazard to life, would escape the vengeance of village patriotism. But the nurse, whom he had placed in charge of me, had no sooner ascertained that I was arrested, than she sent an express to the farm-house. The consequence naturally followed in my liberty; and the night which I expected to have spent freezing on my way to the dungeon, presented me with the pleasant exchange of hospitable shelter, the society of a most accomplished man, and his graceful handsome daughter; and last, not least, a couple of kisses from my late nurse, according to the custom of the country, as glowing and remorseless as those of my portly landlady herself.

We sat for some hours, and scarcely felt them pass in the anxious topics which engrossed us; the perils of France, the prospects of the Allies, and the captivity of the unhappy Bourbons. Now and then the conversation turned on their own hair-breadth escapes, and those of their relatives and friends. Among the rest, the hazards of the De Tourville family were mentioned, and I heard the name of Clotilde pronounced with a sensation indescribable. The name was connected with such displays of fortitude, nobleness of spirit, and deep devotion to the royal cause, that, if I had loved before, I now honoured her. She had saved the lives of her household; she had, by an act of extraordinary, but most perilous affection, saved the life of her mother, at the moment when the first insurgency broke out; and, young as she was, she had exhibited so noble a union of generosity and strength of mind, that the Marquis's eyes filled with tears as he told it, and Amalia buried her forehead in her hands to conceal her convulsive emotions: what must have been mine!

Our conversation was not unfrequently interrupted by bursts of merriment from the outer room, where the peasants were at supper provided by the Marquis for his bold rescuers—an indulgence which they seemed to enjoy with the highest zest imaginable. Songs were sung with very various kinds of merit in the performer, but all well received. Healths were proposed, in which the existing Government was certainly not much honoured; and, if the good wishes of the party could have sent the "Committee of Public Safety," the butcher cabinet of France, to the darkest spot on earth, or under it, its time would have been brief. But even this died away; the laugh subsided, the mirth grew silent, and at length the gardes-de-chasse went away, making the forest ring with their professional whoops and holloas, the remnants of their honest revel. At length the Marquis and his daughter, who were to be on the wing at daybreak for the German frontier, and who had generously offered to take charge of my invalid frame in the same direction, retired; and wrapping myself up in a dark cloak, furnished by my mistress and formed to her showy proportions, I threw myself on the sofa, and was in the land of dreams.

But though I slept, I did not rest. My fever, or my lassitude, or probably some presentiment of the troubled career into which I was to be plunged, made "tired nature's sweet restorer" a stepmother to me. I can never endure hearing the dreams of others, and thus I cannot suffer myself to inflict them on my hearers; but on that night, Queen Mab, like Jehu, drove her horses furiously. Every possible kind of disappointment, vexation, and difficulty; every conceivable shape of things, past and present, rushed through my brain; and all pale, fierce, disastrous, and melancholy. I was beckoned along dim shades by shapeless phantoms; I was trampled in battle; I was brought before a tribunal; I was on board a ship which blew up, and was flung strangling down an infinite depth in a midnight ocean. But this exceeded the privilege even of dreams. I made one desperate effort to rise, and awoke with a bound on the floor. There I found a real obstacle—a ruffian in a red cap. One strong hand was on my throat; and by the glimmer of the dying lantern, which hung from the roof, I saw the glitter of a pistol-barrel in the other. "Surrender in the name of the Republic!" were the words which told me my fate. Four or five wearers of the same ominous emblem, with sabres and pistols, were round me at the moment, and after a brief struggle I was secured. Cries were now heard outside the door, and a wounded gendarme was carried in, borne in the arms of his comrades. From their confused clamour, I could merely ascertain that the gendarmes who had escaped in the original mêlée, had obtained assistance, and returned on their steps. The farm-house had been surrounded, and the Marquis was indebted only to the vigilance of his peasantry for a second escape with his daughter. The gardes-de-chasse had kept the gendarmes at bay until their retreat was secure; and the post-chaise which had brought M. Gilet and his coadjutors, was, by this time, some leagues off, at full speed, beyond the fangs of Republicanism.

This at least was comfort, though I was left behind. But it was clear that the gallant old noble was blameless in the matter, and that nothing was to be blamed but my habitual ill luck. "En route for Paris," was the last order which I heard; and with a gendarme, in the strange kind of post-waggon which was rolled out from the farmer's stable, I was dispatched, before daybreak, on my startling journey.

I found my gendarme a facetious fellow; though his merriment might not be well adapted to cheer his prisoner. He whistled, he sang, he screamed, he stamped, to get rid of the ennui of travelling with so silent a companion. He told stories of his own prowess; libeled M. Gilet, who had got him beaten on this service in the first instance, and who seemed to be in the worst possible odour with man and woman; and abused all, mayors, deputy-mayors, and authorities, with the tongue of a leveler. But my facetious friend had his especial chagrins.

"I have all my life," said he, "been longing to see Paris, and have never been able to stir a step beyond this stupid province. Yet I have had my chances too. I was once valet to a German count, and we were on the way to Paris together when the post-chaise was stopped, the baron was arrested as a swindler, and I was charged as his accomplice. He was sent to the galleys; I got off. I then had a second chance. I enlisted in a regiment of dragoons which was to be quartered in Versailles. But such was my fate, I had no sooner passed the first drill, when we were ordered off to Lorraine to watch old King Stanislaus, the Pole, who lived there like one of his own bears, frozen and fat. Still I was determined to see Paris. I asked leave of absence; the adjutant laughed at me, the colonel turned on his heel, and the provost-marshal gave me a week of the black-hole. But a week is but seven days after all, and on my seeing the parade again—I—"

"You deserted?"

"Not quite that," was the reply. "I took leave, and, as I had seen enough of the black hole already, I took good care to give the provost-marshal no notice on the subject. A fortnight's march brought me within sight of the towers of Notre-Dame. But as I was resting myself on the roadside, our adjutant, as ill luck would have it, came by in the coupe of the diligence. He jumped out. I was seized, given up to the next guard-house, and after fitting me with a pair of fetters, by way of boots, I was ordered to take my passage with a condemned regiment for the West Indies. There I served ten years; I saw the regiment reduced to a skeleton by short rations and new rum; and returned the tenth representative of fifteen hundred felons. At last I have a chance; the gendarme of the village was so desperately mauled by the foresters in the attempt to carry you prisoner, that he has been forced to take to his bed, and let me take his place. The thing is certain now. You will be guillotined, but I shall see Paris."