XXVII…

XXVII

Dunoisse never had sought, never would seek, news or speech or sight of the faithless friend; but now at last, without seeking, within a few days of his return to Paris, came the vision of de Moulny....

It rose before him in a flare of artificial light that made a yellow patch upon the foggy gloaming of that fateful day when the White Flag of Orleans that drooped--or dripped in rainy weather--above the stately central Pavilion of the Palace of the Tuileries began to show unmistakable signs of coming down.

Such signs as the unceasing, resistless rolling of huge, dense, continually-augmenting crowds of the people along the boulevards; through the wider of the ordinary Paris thoroughfares, murmuring as they went, with a sound like the great sea. With other crowds streaming in upon these from the suburbs. With thirty-seven battalions of Infantry, one of Chasseurs d’Orléans, three companies of Engineers, twenty squadrons of Cavalry, five thousand veterans of the Municipal Guard, and five batteries of Artillery, garrisoning the capital. With students of the Schools of Technical Military Instruction, students of Law and Medicine, students of Art, students of Music, starting the Marseillaise in the Place de la Madeleine. With the chant taken up by the Titanic voice of the people. With the breaking of a tidal wave of humanity over the palisades of the Chamber of Deputies; a rolling-back of this before the trampling horses of an advancing squadron of Dragoons; a similar advance upon the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, repelled by Municipal Guards; a shutting of shops, a mushroom-like springing up of Barricades, radiating from the Cloisters of Ste. Marie in the very heart of ancient Paris, extending from the mouths of tortuous streets to the gullets of narrow, crooked alleys, so as to form a citadel where Revolutionists concentrated, waiting instructions from headquarters of secret societies,--pending results of sittings of Committees of Insurrection, held by day and by night in the offices of the Republican Journals,--ready to act without these if they were not forthcoming. While by rail and by road, in answer to the urgent summons of muddy dispatch-bearers on wearied horses, or at the imperative tap-tapping of the electric needle; amidst the roaring and grinding of iron wheels and the trampling of iron-shod hoofs; a never-ending flood of armed men rolled down on Paris.

Now, upon a deputation from the Fourth Legion of the National Guard, calling upon a certain Crémieux, Deputy of the Opposition, with a petition to the Chamber, demanding dismissal of Ministers and Electoral Reform, came by the dawning of the twenty-fourth of February the rumor that this demanded change was actually To Be--a rumor meaning little to some, welcomed by others as the first indication of the scepter of St. Louis falling from a weak, relaxing Royal hand. Huge bonfires, made by students, of the heaped-up wooden benches belonging to the Champs-Élysées, had showed officers of the Staff galloping hither and thither with orders and counter-orders all through the raw, bleak night; had illuminated the crowds assembled to stare at the spectacle of Royal troops bivouacking on boulevards and public squares; and had been reflected in the shining bronze and polished steel of cannon, posted on the Places du Carrousel and de la Concorde.

But as yet, though Paris had seen the pulling-down, by detachments of the military, of the barricades choking those narrow labyrinthine streets that were the veins of the heart of her, and had winked at the building-up of these by the Revolutionists as fast as they were demolished; but, though a volley or two had made matchwood of the tables and chairs, the market-carts and omnibuses of the Barricades; though some minor conflicts between the People and the Police had ended with the tearing of tricolors and the capture of a red flannel petticoat mounted on a barber’s pole, and the dispatch of a few laden stretchers to the Hospitals; though a bayonet-point or so had been reddened; though the edge of a saber may have been used here and there, instead of the flat; though a guerilla-warfare between scattered groups of Socialists with revolvers and bludgeons and small parties of Dragoons and Cuirassiers made public streets and squares perilous for peaceable citizens; though Republicans had disarmed the National Guards of the Batignolles and burned the station at the barrier, and though the rappel had been beaten and Legion by Legion these tax-paying citizen-soldiers were answering to the call to arms,--as yet the anticipated insurrection had not begun.

The sails of the Red Windmills that grind out Civil War hung slack, though the piquets of Dragoons and Chasseurs, posted at the openings of the streets and thoroughfares, had been on duty for thirty-six hours; were swaying with weariness and hunger in the saddles of their exhausted, tottering horses, their haggard faces half-hidden as they dozed behind the high collars of their long gray cloaks....

How did the spark reach the powder? Processions had been formed in token of popular delight at the announced change in the Government. Bloused workmen armed with pikes and sabers and pistols that had done duty in 1793, half-fledged boys with bludgeons or cheap revolvers, women of the Faubourgs with babies or choppers or broomsticks, the swarming life of the poorest quarters formed into column under the Tricolor or the Red Flag. Such a column came muddily rolling towards the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, filled the Rue de Choiseul with no sound beyond the trampling of feet, many of them in wooden shoes, many more naked, while the head of the column advanced upon the front of the Hotel, that, like its assailable sides and rear, was protected by a steel hedge, the bayonets of a half-battalion of the Line, hastily summoned from their barracks in the Rue de l’Assyrie, some twenty-four hours previously.

The Colonel and one or two officers who were personally acquainted with the Minister in popular disfavor had been summoned to a conference--involving dinner--in his private apartments looking on the garden--from which he was a little later to escape, disguised in a footman’s livery. An Assistant-Adjutant commanded the companies of infantry that stemmed the onward rolling of those muddy waves of humanity that threatened to swamp the front courtyard--a slender, black-eyed, soldierly young Staff-officer of perhaps twenty-seven, with a reddish skin tanned to swarthiness by desert sunshine and dust-winds.

It was Hector Dunoisse. He sat upon an iron-gray half-breed Arab mare at the upper outer end of the bristling double line of bayonets and red képis that were flanked at either end by a squadron of Municipal Guards. The shako of a subaltern officer showed at the rear of the files, behind the Lieutenant rose the white-painted, gilt-headed railings topping the wall that enclosed the courtyard of the Hotel, carriages and cabriolets waiting there in charge of their owners’ servants, the broad steps under the high sculptured portico dotted with curious groups of uniformed officials or liveried lackeys, or neutral-tinted strangers who had taken refuge there before the advancing column with its flaring naphtha torches and its Red Flag, and its raucous roar of voices....

There were even ladies amongst the groups in the courtyard. One, who wore a costly mantle of ermines, revealing between its parting folds a brilliant evening-toilette, upon whose bare white bosom diamonds and rubies glowed and sparkled; who had a coronet of the same jewels crowning the rich luxuriance of her curled and braided hair, stood apart, isolated from the rest, under the tall wrought-iron standard of a gas-lamp not yet lighted, talking to a tall, heavily-built young man wearing the chocolate, gold-buttoned, semi-military frock-coat that, in conjunction with trousers striped with narrow gold braid, formed the uniforms of secretaries and attachés of the Foreign Office. And that the young man was very much more absorbed by the conversation of his companion than the lady was in her listener was evident. For while his light brown head with its carefully massed locks and accurate side-parting was bent down towards her so that you saw his profile, the accurate tuft of reddish whisker above the black satin stock, the large handsome ear, the heavy clumsy nose, the jutting underlip and long, obstinate chin, her full face was constantly turned towards the packed and seething thoroughfare before the tall iron gates, and the living barrier of human flesh and horsemeat and steel that guarded them. And that face was very fair to see. Even in the uncertain gloaming, the loveliness of it went to the heart like a sword....

Now as the foggy dusk of the gray February day closed coldly in, and the muddy sea of humanity surged up against the wall of steel and discipline that Authority had built before the lofty gilt-topped railings of the Hotel of Foreign Affairs, the oil-cressets on the gate-pillars and above the central arch that spanned the entrance were lighted by the porters, the great gas-lamp in the courtyard and under the portico roared and hooted into an illumination that dimmed the smoky, flaring torches of the men who marched with the Red Flag. As the Adjutant on the iron-gray charger rode along the gleaming gray line of leveled bayonets, bidding the men close up;--as he called over the heads of the rank-and-file, giving some order to the Lieutenant, the young attaché who was conversing with the lady in the ermine mantle started and looked round. There was something in the clear, frosty ring of the voice that recalled ... a voice he had once known. His hard blue eyes met the eyes of the black-haired swarthy officer on the half-breed Arab the next instant. And--with a cold, thrilling shock of recognition, dying out in a crisping shudder of the nerves, Redskin and de Moulny knew each other again.

The fiery, sensitive Arab felt her rider’s violent start, a sudden contraction of the muscles of the sinewy thighs that gripped her satiny sides drove both spurs home to the quick, behind the girths. As the Red Flag showed through the thick rank smoke of naphtha-torches held high in grimy hands, Djelma bounded forwards, snorting fiercely at the unexpected sting; reared at the checking bit, backed, still rearing, upon the goading steel points behind; lashed madly out, wounding herself yet more, and, knocking down two linesmen; then plunged forwards, kicking, screaming, and biting, into the thick of the crowd.

Those who marched with the Red Flag took the rebellion of Djelma as obedience, and resented being trampled, after the manner of mankind. Dunoisse was struck on the bridle-arm by a bludgeon wielded by a red-capped, bloused, bearded artisan. A frowsy, bare-bosomed woman aimed a savage blow at him with that deadly weapon of the lower classes, a baby. The man who carried the drum went down at a blow from the Arab’s fore-foot. The empty-sounding crack of the splintered instrument, the oaths and yells and curses of the crowd were mingled in the ears of Dunoisse with the snorting of Djelma, the cries and exclamations from the thronged courtyard behind the wall of soldiers. A single shot cracked out behind him: the finger that pressed the trigger upset the Cabinet, changed the Government, toppled the rocking House of Orleans over with one touch. For instantly following the detonation of the shot a sharp, loud, bold, imperious voice cried:

“Fire!”

And, the next instant, jagged tongues of flame ran along the front line of leveled bayonets, the deafening clatter of a volley of musketry reverberated from the many-windowed façade of the Hotel, mingled with the splintering and shattering of glass; ran rattling up and down adjacent streets and neighboring thoroughfares, mingled with the echoes of shrieks and curses and groans.... Tumult prevailed, the Municipal Guard charged, striking with the flat of the saber ... the Red Flag wavered and staggered, the column broke up, its units fled in disorder to the Rue Lafitte. Pandemonium reigned there, a hundred voices telling a hundred stories of massacre deliberately planned....

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XXVIII

You could not see the soldiers’ faces, the smoke of that deadly volley had rolled back and hung low, topping the living wall of steel and flesh. But as it lifted, and they saw, by the light of the lamps in the courtyard behind them, the bloody heaps of dead and wounded men and women, mingled with children not a few, that made a shambles of the thoroughfare, upon whose gory stones the drum lay flattened, a hollow groan burst from the wavering ranks, and oaths and threats were uttered. Some wept, others were violently sick, as dying fellow-creatures crept to their feet to call them murderers, as fallen torches hissed and sputtered in the blood that ran down the gutters and lay in puddles on the pavement of the boulevard.

Confusion reigned in the Hotel, a Babel of voices clamored in the courtyard that was seething with excited humanity and littered with broken glass and bits of plaster knocked from the walls by ricocheting bullets. As Dunoisse returned on foot, leading his limping, bleeding mare through the dead and dying; de Roux, Colonel commanding the 999th, a plethoric pursy bon-vivant, who had been dining with the unpopular Minister in his private cabinet that looked upon the gardens, and had been snatched from the enjoyment of an entrée of canard à la, Rouennaise by the crash of the discharge, burst out of the Hotel, thrust his way through the huddled ranks, bore down on the supposed culprit, gesticulating and raving:

“Death and damnation! Hell and furies!----”

The purple, glaring Colonel struck his breast with his clenched hand, and though the action smacked of tragedy, the napkin, still tucked between the military stock and the gold-encrusted collar that had preserved the gray-blue uniform field-frock from spatterings of soup or splashes of gravy--no less than the silver fork the warrior yet grasped, imparted an air of farce to his passionate harangue.

* * * * *

--“Madman!” he spluttered out; “what crazy impulse induced you to give the word to fire?... Insensate homicide!--do you know what you have done? Take his parole, Lieutenant Mangin. Not a word, sir! You shall reply to the interrogations of a military tribunal, as to this evening’s bloody work!”

Dunoisse, forbidden to explain or exonerate himself, saluted the blotchy, wild-eyed Colonel, and gave up his sword to his junior. You saw him apparently calm, if livid under his Red Indian’s skin, and bleeding from a bullet-graze that burned upon his cheek like red-hot iron. The leather peak of his red shako had been partly shot away, the skirt of the tight-waisted gray-blue field-frock had a bullet-rent in it. His throat seemed as though compressed by the iron collar of the garotte, his heart beat as though it must burst from the breast that caged it. But his head was held stiff and high, and his black eyes never blinked or shifted, though his lips, under the little black mustache with the curved and pointed ends, made a thin white line against the deep sienna-red of his richly-tinted skin.

“Sacred thunder!... Return to your quarters, sir!”

De Roux, becoming alive to the napkin, plucked it from his bemedaled bosom and, realizing the fact of the fork, whipped it smartly behind his back. Dunoisse saluted stiffly, gave up his bleeding charger to his orderly, saluted again, wheeled, and deliberately stepped out of the radius of the Hotel gas-lamps, flaring still, though their massive globes had been broken by ricocheting bullets, into the dense gray fog that veiled the boulevard, where dimly-seen figures moved, groping among the dead, in search of the living....

“The Monarchy will pay dearly for this act of criminal folly!... How came he to give the order?” de Roux demanded.

And the subaltern officer, whose glance had followed the retreating figure of Dunoisse, withdrew it to reply:

“My Colonel, he gave no order. A pistol-shot came from behind us--a voice that was a stranger’s cried ‘Fire!’ The discharge followed instantly, and the people fled, leaving their dead behind them.”

“Why did he not defend himself?” de Roux muttered, glancing over his shoulder at the huge broken-windowed façade of the Hotel rising beyond the imposing carriage-entrance, the enclosing wall and the gateway and the tall spear-headed railings that backed the huddled figures and lowering, sullen faces of the unlucky half-battalion.

“Because, my Colonel, you had ordered him to be silent, and to return to his quarters. They are in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. And he has gone to them by that route.”

The Lieutenant’s sword pointed the direction in which the slim, upright, soldierly figure had vanished. The Colonel growled:

“Why should he choose that route?...”

And the Lieutenant thought, but did not answer:

“Possibly because he hopes to meet Death upon the way!...”

Colonel de Roux, with clank of trailing scabbard and jingle of gilt spurs, stormed up the double line of abashed and drooping red képis. Interrogated, Monsieur the Captain in command of the company posted at the eastern angle of the courtyard enclosure, gave in substance the information already supplied.

“A pistol-shot came from behind us--a stranger’s voice gave the order ‘Fire!’--the discharge followed.... One would have said it was an arranged thing. One would----”

“Chut!”

De Roux glanced over his gold-encrusted shoulder at the façade of broken windows and chipped stone ornaments. The Captain, the same lively de Kerouatte who had paid Dunoisse that ancient moss-grown debt of three thousand francs upon the steps of Rothschild’s, continued, as though the note of warning had not reached his ear:

“Madame de Roux would be able to corroborate. I saw Madame--previously to the deplorable accident--in the Hotel vestibule, conversing with an official in diplomatic uniform. She----”

“You are mistaken, sir!” said the Colonel, purple where he had been crimson, mulberry-black where he had been purple, and screwing with a rasping sound at his bristling mustache: “Madame de Roux is on a visit to some young relatives at Bagneres. This perturbed and disaffected capital is no place for a soul so sensitive, a nature so impressionable as Madame’s. I have begged her to remain absent until these disturbances are calmed.”

“A hundred thousand pardons! My Colonel, how idiotic of me not to have remembered that I had the honor of meeting Madame de Roux upon the Public Promenade at Bagneres only yesterday.... I ventured to accost Madame, and asked her whether I could have the honor to convey any message to you? Madame said ‘None,’ but added that she felt deliciously well. And to judge by appearances, there is no doubt but that the air of Bagneres agrees with her to a marvel!”

De Kerouatte reeled off this unblushing fabrication with an air of innocence ineffably insulting, inconceivably fraught with offense. De Roux could grow no blacker--against the congested duskiness of his face his little red wild-boar’s eyes showed pale pink. They routed savagely in the large blue orbs of the speaker, guileless and unruffled as pools upon a Mediterranean shore, found nothing there; were wrenched away.... He gobbled out the beginning of an incoherent sentence--and then a messenger came with a hurried summons from the Minister, and the Colonel clanked and jingled back into the Hotel, from the gates of which pedestrians were unobtrusively gliding, while coupés, chariots, barouches, and landaus, driven by nervous coachmen and with pale faces peeping from their windows, or hidden behind their close-drawn blinds, or concealed behind thick veils, or upturned collars of cloaks and overcoats, were rolling hurriedly away.

The Colonel’s gilt spurs had not long jingled over the tesselated pavement of the vestibule, before, from one of the smaller, private waiting-rooms, the figure of a lady emerged. A tall, rounded shape moving with a swaying supple grace “as though on clouds,” wrapped in an evening mantle of sumptuous ermines, its snowy folds drawn close as though its wearer were desirous of silencing even the whisper of silken skirts; a thick veil of creamy lace wrapped about her head. She beckoned with a little hand, that had great blazing rubies on its slender finger and childlike wrist; and from a corner of the wide courtyard, crashing over the broken glass and shattered fragments of the carved stone wreaths that garlanded the high windows, came a little, dark brougham lined with gray velvet, a vehicle of the unpretending kind in which ladies who gambled on the Bourse were wont to drive to their stockbrokers, or in which ladies who gambled with their reputations were accustomed to be conveyed elsewhere....

A nondescript official, neither lackey nor porter, still mottled and streaky in complexion from the recent alarm of the fusillade, emerged from some unlighted corner of the tall portico into the flaring yellow gaslight, followed the lady of the ermine mantle down the wide steps, and with zealous clumsiness suggestive of the Police, pushed forward to open the carriage door. Recoiling from his assiduous civility with palpable uneasiness, the lady shook her veiled head. The intruder persisted, prevailed; and in that instant found himself thrust aside by the vigorous arm and powerful shoulder of a tall, heavily-built young man in the chocolate, gold-buttoned, semi-military undress frock that distinguished secretaries and attachés of the Ministry.

“You presume, my friend!” said a voice the lady knew; and she rustled to her seat, and settled there with nestling, birdlike movements, a light brown, carefully-curled head bent towards her. The scent of cigars and the fashionable red jasmine came to her with the entreaty:

“There may be peril for you in these streets.... Will you not let me accompany you home?”

“In that coat.... Not for the world!” said a soft voice through the intervening veil, and the warm perfumed darkness of the little brougham. “You would expose me to the very peril you are anxious to avert.”

“True!” he said, repentant. “I was a fool not to remember! Grant but a moment and the coat is changed!”

“I would grant more than a moment,” she answered in a voice of strange, ineffable cadences, “to the wearer, were the coat of the right color!” A little trill of laughter, ending the sentence, robbed it of weight while adding subtlety. But its meaning went to the quick. De Moulny sighed out into the fragrant darkness:

“Oh,--Henriette! Henriette!”

She continued as though she had not heard:

“And I hope to see you wearing it--a little later on. Good-night, my friend. Do not be anxious for my safety. My coachman will be cautious. All will be well!” She added: “You see I am becoming prudent, rather late in the day.”

He said, and his tone grated:

“They will mark the day in the calendar with red.”

A sob set the warm sweet air within the enchanted brougham vibrating.

“You are too cruel. I have been guilty of an act of unpardonable folly. But who would have dreamed of so terrible a result?”

“Anyone,” he answered her in a bitter undertone, “who has ever set a kindled match to gunpowder, or poured alcohol upon a blazing fire!”

The light from the carriage-lamps showed his white face plainly. His hard blue eyes frightened her,--his forehead seemed that of a judge. She shivered, and her whisper was as piercing as a scream:

“Or dared a woman to commit an act of rashness. Do not you in your heart condemn me as a murderess? Your tongue may deny it, but your eyes have told me that instead of rolling in a carriage over those bloodstained stones beyond these gates, I should crawl over them upon my hands and knees. Is it not so, Alain?”

Between the thick frosted flowers of her veil, her brilliant glance penetrated. A cold little creeping shudder stiffened the hair upon his scalp and trickled down between his broad shoulders like melted snow.... Her breath came to him as a breeze that has passed over a field of flowering clover. Her lips, as they uttered his name, stung him to the anguished longing for their kiss.

“I have not condemned you!” he muttered. “Do not be unjust to me!”

She breathed in a whisper that touched his forehead like a caress:

“Had you reproached me, you would have been in the right. Well, dare me again!--to denounce the person guilty of this massacre.... I am quite capable of doing it, I give you my word!... Perhaps they would send me to Ham!... Who knows?”

A nervous titter escaped her. She bent her head, trying to stifle it, but it would have its way. She caught the lace of her veil in her little white teeth and nipped it. De Moulny saw the creamy rounded throat that was clasped by a chain of diamonds, swell within the ermine collar. He knew, as he inhaled the seductive fragrance that emanated from her, the exquisite allure of whiteness against white. Visions so poignant were evoked, that he remained spellbound, leaning to her, drinking her in. She continued, and now with real agitation:

“I shall see them in my dreams, those dead men in blouses,--if ever I sleep again!... Ah, bah! Horrible!... Please tell the coachman home. Rue de Sèvres.” She added before he withdrew his head to obey her: “Unless I take the Prefecture of Police upon my way?...”

He retorted with violence:

“Be silent! You shall not torture me as you are doing!”

“Then,” she said, with another hysterical stifled titter, “pray tell the coachman to take me home.”

He told the man, who leaned a haggard face from the box to listen; and added a warning to drive through the most unfrequented streets and to be careful of Madame. To Madame he said, hovering over her for another fascinated instant before he shut the carriage door upon the warm seductive sweetness:

“Remember, you are not to be held accountable for a moment of madness. You never meant to pull the trigger. I swear that you did not!”

He drew back his head and shut the door. The window was down, and he looked in over it to say again: “Remember!” A whisper caught his ear:

“The pistol.... Where is it?”

He touched himself significantly upon the breast.

“I have it here. I shall keep it! You are not to be trusted with such dangerous things, impulsive and excitable as you are.”

“Dear friend, such weapons are to be bought where one will, and those who sell them do not inquire into the temperament of the buyer. Tell me something, Alain!...”

He said in the passionate undertone:

“I love you to madness!... Henriette!...”

“Ah, not that now, dear friend, I beg of you!”

“Henriette, I implore you”

A small warm velvet hand alighted on de Moulny’s mouth. He kissed it devouringly. It was drawn away, and next instant the sweet, sighing voice launched a poisoned dart that pierced him to the marrow:

“Tell me, Alain! If I pulled the trigger of the pistol in a moment of madness, were you quite sane when you cried out ‘Fire!’?”

She pulled up the window as de Moulny, with a deathly face, fell back from it. The coachman, taking the sound as a signal, whipped up the eager horse. The little brougham rolled through the tall gateway into the frosty fog that hung down like a gray curtain over the bloody pavement, and was swallowed up in the mad whirlpool of Insurrection, to be cast up again on the shores of the Second Republic of France.

* * * * *

Follow, not the furtive little brougham, but Dunoisse, rejected of Death, perhaps because he courted the grim mower.... Follow him through the populous fog to the corner of the Rue Lafitte, where the scattered units of the shattered column of bloused men and wild-eyed women had assembled in front of the Café Tortoni, occupying the angle between this street and the boulevard.

A bearded man, the same who had carried the Red Flag, was addressing the people from the steps of the Café. He had been wounded, the blood dripped from the clenched hand he shook above his head, as he denounced the perfidy of Ministers, the ingratitude of Kings, and the blood-lust of the Army, who for gold spilled their brothers’ lives. A sullen roar went up at each of his phrases, the vast crowd of listeners about his impromptu rostrum heaved and billowed, and whitened with furious faces constantly tossed up, like patches of foam upon a sinister sea.

Dunoisse, like a striving swimmer, battled in the muddy waves of that same sea, in the endeavor to reach the steps where raved the orator. It was too dark for the owners of those bodies between which he forced his way to distinguish that he was in uniform, and, so, realizing his desperate determination, they aided him.

But when at last he gained the steps, and the mingling glare and flare of the oil-lamps and the gas showed up the loathed gray-blue and red of the Line--though the Staff shako bore no number to identify its wearer as an officer of the regiment that had fired upon them--the cry that went up from all those hot and steaming throats was as the howl of ravening wolves:

“Murderer! Accursed! Back to your corps! Down with the Ministry! Down with the Line!”...

A hundred hands, some of them stained with red, thrust out to seize Dunoisse and tear and rend him. A hundred voices demanded his blood in expiation, his life for all those lives spilled on the paving-stones of the Boulevard des Capucines....

“Take it if you will!” cried Dunoisse at the fullest pitch of his clear hard ringing voice, “but let me speak!”

The flaring lamps threw pale patches of light and black patches of shadow on his face, but there was no fear there. He snatched off the bullet-pierced shako and showed them the peak that had been partly shot away; tugged at the Staff epaulet hanging by a waxed thread or two; lifted the full skirt of the tight-waisted gray-blue field-frock and showed the bullet-holes in the cloth....

“What is it to me what you do?” he cried. “Death comes to all sooner or later. But upon the honor of a gentleman!--on the parole of an officer!--I gave no order to fire. The shot came from behind! The voice that cried ‘Fire!’ was not mine. I swear it upon the faith of a Catholic!”

This was not a popular asseveration. The voice of the speaker was drowned in execrations:

“Ah, malefactor! Assassin! Down with him! Down with the priests! Death to the Army! Long live Reform!”

His voice was no longer audible.... He made signs, entreating a hearing; the bellowing, hooting, yelling redoubled. Stones flew, banging on the shutters of the restaurant, denting its barred and bolted doors, smashing unshuttered upper windows. A man with a musket leaped on the steps, and leveled the loaded weapon; the unfortunate young officer looked at him with a smile. Death would have been so simple a way out of the cul-de-sac in which Dunoisse now found himself. For if the People would not believe, neither would the Army. He was, thanks to this cruel freak of Fate, a broken, ruined man. Perhaps his face conveyed his horrible despair, for the fury of the crowd abated; they ceased to threaten, but they would not listen, they turned sullenly away. And the bearded man who had carried the Red Flag, tapped him on the epaulet, made a significant gesture, and said contemptuously:

“Be off with you!”

Dunoisse, abandoned even by Death, looked at the speaker blankly. He was burnt out; the taste of ashes was bitter in his mouth. His head fell upon his breast and the world grew dim about him. There was a cloud of thick darkness within his brain, compared with which the frosty fog of that February night was clarity itself.

Then the fog lifted, and he was alone. The boulevard was deserted, the chairs and little marble-topped tables used by drinkers of absinthes and vermouths, lay tumbled all about upon the stones.... Shops and restaurants had their shutters up; windows that had no shutters had been blocked with mattresses and chests of drawers. A body of mounted Chausseurs galloped down the Rue Lafitte, posted a piquet at the corner of its junction with the Boulevard, and galloped away again into the fog. Out of which came back the clatter of iron-shod hoofs, and the ring and clink of steel on steel, and drifts of the Marseillaise and cries of vengeance.

Dunoisse went to his rooms in the paternal hotel in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, and sat in the dark, and saw a pair of cold blue eyes, and the thick-lipped supercilious smile he knew of old painted upon the shadowy blackness, and the ceaseless roaring of voices and rolling of wheels through the streets of Paris, mingled with the roaring of the blood in his ears.

He knew that this meant black ruin if the Monarchy stood, and ruin blacker still if Red Revolution swept the Monarchy into the gutter. Whose was the hand that had been guilty of the fatal pistol-shot?

He knew, or thought he knew--for the voice that had cried out “Fire!” had been undoubtedly de Moulny’s. And the anguish he tasted was of the poignant, exquisite quality that we may only know when the hand that has stabbed us under cover of the dark has been proved to be that of a friend.

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XXIX

The people collected their dead and their wounded and commandeered wagons, and loaded them with the pale harvest reaped from the bloody paving-stones before the great gateway and the tall gilded railings and the chipped façade with the shattered windows, behind which the unpopular driver of the Coach of the Crown sat gripping the broken reins of State.

Pallida Mors headed the grim midnight procession. And as it rolled, to the slow wailing of a mournful chant, by the light of flaring torches through the streets, upon its way to the offices of the National and the Réforme,--where lights had burned, and men had sat in conference for sixty hours past,--those who marched with it knocked at the doors of scared, unsleeping citizens, crying: “Wake! behold the deeds that are done by Kings!” And the noise of firing, and of furious cries, with the clanging of church-bells, sounding the tocsin at the bidding of Revolutionary hands, reached the ears of pale Louis Philippe at the Tuileries, and must have shrieked in them that all was over!

For all was over even before the Place du Palais Royal was filled by thousands of armed insurgents; before the Palais was stormed and gutted; before the Fifth Legion of the National Guard,--having its Major, its Lieutenant-Colonel, and several officers in command--marched upon the Tuileries; followed by the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, and Tenth: before the Deed of Abdication was signed--the Royal dwelling emptied of its garrison--the shabby one-horse hackney coach called from the stand--(the Royal carriages having been burned)--and before the Monarchy, covered with an ancient round hat, clad in worn black garments, and with only five francs or so in its pockets, had emerged by the little wicket-gateway near the Obelisk, stepped into the humble conveyance above mentioned, and passed away at full gallop, surrounded by Chausseurs and Municipal Guards, and accompanied by a running cortége of mechanics, artisans, nursemaids, gamins, ragpickers, shoeblacks, and other representatives of the Sovereign People.

With the aid of the English Admiralty, and the British Consul at Havre, Mr. Thomas Smith, his lady and their grandchildren, obtained berths on the Express packet-boat; and, despite the activities of the local Procurer of the Republic--not to mention certain perils incurred through the too-excellent memory of a certain female commissionaire or tout for cheap lodging-houses, Madame Mousset by name,--who by the light of her dark lantern recognized Majesty even minus its whiskers--the voyage to Newhaven was accomplished without disaster. Claremont received the Royal refugees; the Tory organs of the English Press were distinctly sympathetic; even the ultra-Whig prints, amidst stirring descriptions of barricade-fighting and the carnage on the Boulevard des Capucines, refrained from the dubious sport of mud-throwing at the monarch all shaven and shorn....

The popular Reviews devoted some pages to the favorable comparison of peaceable, contented, happy England (then pinched and gaunt with recent famine, breaking out in angry spots with Chartist riots)--with feverish, frantic, furious France. In The Ladies’ Mentor, the leading periodical published for the delectation of the sex we were accustomed in those days to designate as “soft” and “gentle,” there is indeed in Our Weekly Letter from Paris a reference to “the landing of a royal and venerable exile upon our happier shores”; but beyond this, not a single reference or allusion calculated to shock the delicate sensibilities of my Aunt Julietta, or any other young gentlewoman of delicacy and refinement....

The pen of the writer of the above-named delicious epistles reverts with evident relief to the latest thing in Concert-dresses. A full-gored skirt of green velvet with a gathered flounce in pink crèpe up to the knee ... could anything be more genteel? The hair should be waved; brought low to hide the ears--“A pity,” reflected my Aunt Julietta, “when mine are so much prettier than poor dear Marietta’s!”--and wreathed with a garland of natural blooms, in the ease of young ladies ... the heads of matrons being adorned with caps of costly lace, or lappets, fastened with the artificial rose.

Pompadour fans were also the rage. One-button gloves, worn with broad bracelets of gold, or black velvet with cameo clasps, were de rigueur. Sleeves for day-wear were elbow-length with volantes of guipure. For evening, short and puffed. Pray remember that these were the days of swanlike necks and champagne-bottle shoulders, high, expansive brows, large melting Oriental eyes, and waists that tapered. And considering the obstinate preference of Dame Nature for turning out her daughters in different shapes, makes, and sizes, it is marvelous how all the women of the era managed to look exactly alike....

* * * * *

My Aunt Julietta had to hunt up the meanings of the descriptive foreign terms so thickly peppered over Our Weekly Letter from Paris, in perchance the very dictionary whence their gifted writer, then resident at Peckham, had culled them, before she could settle down to perusal of the exquisite Lines Addressed To A Fading Violet, which are to be found at the bottom of the second column of the adjoining page; and the delicious Essay upon Woman’s Love, which usurps the whole of the first column. It begins like this:

“No true woman ever loved who did not venerate the object of her passion, and who did not delight, nay, rejoice to bend in adoring worship before the throne on which He sits exalted who is at once her slave and the idol of her soul!”

Even as my Aunt Julietta stopped reading to dry her gentle maiden tears, Paris was bowing before the idol of her soul. She called it Freedom; and when from a window of the Hôtel de Ville the Citizen Lamartine proclaimed the Second Republic, how frenzied was her joy!

For Paris is a spoiled and petted courtesan, who, suffering from the burden of her very luxury, welcomes a fresh possessor. The new lover may be poorer than the old; he may be even brutal, but he is new.... And while he is new he pleases, and while he pleases he will not be betrayed....

You are to imagine, amidst what burning of powder and enthusiasm, what singing of the Marseillaise and the Chant des Girondins by the multitudes of patriots in the streets, as by red-capped prime donne at the Opera, was carried out the refurbishing and gilding of those three ancient Jagannaths, baptized so long ago in human blood by the divine names of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

And you are to suppose yourself witness--many similar scenes being enacted elsewhere--of the White Flag of Orleans being hauled down from above the gilded bronze gates and the great central Pavilion of the Palace of the Tuileries, and the Tricolor breaking out in its place.

Conceive, this being accomplished with bloodshed, and sweat, and frenzy; France neighing for a new paramour, even as the perfumed and adorned harlot of Holy Writ. He came, as for her bitter scourging it was written he should come.... From what depths he rose up, with his dull, inscrutable eyes, his manner silky, ingratiating, suave as that of the Swiss-Italian manager of a restaurant grill-room; his consummate insincerity, his hidden aims and secret ambitions; and his horribly-evident, humiliating, galling impecuniosity, it is for a great writer and satirist to tell in days to be.

The monk of old, dubbed idler and shaveling by the little-read, when he ceased from his stupendous labors for God with pickaxe and drill and saw, the crane and pulley and rope, the mortar-hod and trowel, the plumb and adze and hammer and chisel, to serve Him in the making of illuminated books of His Word, service and song; took unto him a clean unused quill, or a pointed brush of woodcock’s hackles or hare’s fur, and dipped it in liquid gold, or the purple that the Catholic Church has ever held sacred, when he would write the ineffable Name of the KING OF KINGS. With ground lapis-lazuli, sprinkled with diamond dust, he set down the Divine Titles of JESUS CHRIST THE SAVIOR.... Mary the Immaculate Mother gleams forth with the pearly-white sheen of the dove’s breast from a background of purest turquoise. No archangel but has his initial letter of distinctive, characteristic splendor, from the glowing ruby of Michael, all-glorious Captain of the hosts-militant of Heaven, to the amethyst of Raphael, and Gabriel’s hyacinth-blue....

The more glorious the Saint, the more gallant the colors that adorn the strap-borders and historiated initials of the pages. Each prophet, sage, ruler, lawgiver of Holy Writ is decked as he deserves; nor do great generals like Saul, David, and Joshua, lack the trumpet-note of martial scarlet; while Ahab, Jezebel, Haman, are spotted as with leprosy, and livid as with corruption; and no China-ink is black enough to score down Judas, the betrayer of his Lord. While to the dreadful enemy of mankind are allotted the orange-yellow of devouring, hellish flame, and the livid blue of burning brimstone; and the verdigris-green, metallic scales of the Snake of Eden diaper the backgrounds of the letters, and the poisonous bryony, the henbane, and the noxious trailing vine of the deadly nightshade wreath and garland them about.

* * * * *

Find me a rusted nib, worn and corroded with long use in the office of a knavish attorney, where perjurers daily kiss the Book for hire, and the life-blood of pale men and haggard women is sucked away by the fierce, insatiable horse-leech of Costs. In what medium shall it be dipped to pen the cognomen and style of the man I have it in my mind to write of?

All the blood shed in that accursed December of the Coup d’Etat of 1851 flowed quickly away down the Paris gutters; it has vanished from the pavements of the Rue Montmartre, and from the flagstones of the courtyard of the Prefecture; was drunk by the thirsty gravel of the Champ de Mars, where battues of human beings were carried out, but it has left its indelible stain behind....

Scrape me a pinch of dust from those dark, accusing, ominous patches; and pound therewith a fragment of the moldering skull of a British soldier (of all those hundreds that lie buried in the pest-pits of Varna, and in those deep trenches beside the lake of Devna, one can well be spared). Compound from the soil of Crim Tartary (enriched so well with French and English blood) a jet-black pigment. Dilute with water from the River Alma. And then, with ink so made, write down the name of Charles Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the Prince of Pretenders, who became by fraud and craft and treachery and murder, Emperor of France.

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XXX

Dunoisse had anticipated as the result of that fatal volley a Court-Martial inquiry under auspices Monarchical or Republican--and in the absence of indisputable evidence that the word of command to fire had not been given by the officer accused, a sentence of dismissal of that unlucky functionary from the Army.

The sword did not fall. The Assistant-Adjutant remained suspended from his duties, and in confinement at his quarters in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, exactly five days; during which Paris seethed like a boiling pot, and the events this halting pen has striven to set forth, sprang from the dragon’s teeth sown in the fruitful soil of France by incapable, unjust, or treacherous hands. Various documents, clumsily printed in smeary ink upon paper of official buff, reached Dunoisse during this period of detention; and whereas Number One was headed by the arms of the Reigning House of Bourbon, Number Two displayed a significant blotch of sable printing-ink in lieu of that ornate device; with “REPUBLIC OF FRANCE” stamped in bold Roman capitals across the upper margin.

Monsieur the Marshal, despite his increasing infirmities, enlivened his son’s captivity with occasional visits. The smell of blood and gunpowder, the thunder of cannon and the summons of the trumpet, had made the old war-horse prick up his ears, neigh and prance about in his cosy paddock. He pooh-poohed the notion of a Court-Martial. Absorbing immense pinches of snuff, he argued--and not without point--that a Republican Government could hardly visit with the scourges of condign displeasure an act that had materially hastened the downfall of the Monarchy.

“You will see!... It is as I say!... This arrest is a mere piece of official humbug. No doubt it was better for your own sake that you should not be seen in the streets for a day or so, one can conceive that!--these ultra-Reds have good memories and long knives, sacred name of a pig!”

The old man trumpeted in his yellow silk handkerchief, hobbling about the room in tremendous excitement, swinging the ample skirts and heavy tassels of his Indian silk dressing-gown, twirling his gold-headed Malacca cane to the detriment of the inlaid furniture and the cabinets loaded with the chinaware and porcelain that had belonged to the lost Marie-Bathilde....

“You gave the word to fire--why trouble to deny it? Upon my part, I defend the act!--I applaud it!--I admire! It was the idea of an Imperialist,--a move of strategical genius--fraught at a moment like this with profound political significance. Sapristi!--we shall have an Emperor crowned and reigning at the Tuileries, and you, with the Cross and a Staff appointment--you will learn what it means to have served a Bonaparte. Ha! hah, ha!”

“Sir,” said his son, who had been looking out of the window during this tirade, and who now turned a sharp set face upon the father’s gross, inflamed, triumphant visage: “you mistake.... I am not capable of committing murder for the furtherance of political ends or private ambitions. For this act that commands your admiration I am not responsible. I declare my innocence before Heaven! and shall to my latest breath, before the tribunals of men.”

“Ta, ta, ta! Blague! rhodomontade!--pure bosh and nonsense!” The Marshal took an immense double pinch of snuff. “Be as innocent as you please before Heaven, but if you value the esteem of men who are men--’credieu!--and not priests and milksops, you will do well to appear what you call guilty. At this moment such a chance is yours as falls to not one man in a hundred thousand--as fell to me but once in my life. Make the most of it! You will if you are not absolutely a fool!”

And Monsieur the Marshal hobbled to the door, but came back to say:

“You appear not to have heard that His Hereditary Highness of Widinitz is dead. There can be no obligation upon you to refrain from appearing at ordinary social functions, but I presume you will accord to your grandfather’s memory the customary tokens of respect? A band of crape upon the sleeve--a knot of crape upon the sword-hilt will not compromise your dignity, or endanger your independence, I presume?”

“I presume not, sir!” said Hector with an unmoved face.

And the Marshal departed, spilling enough snuff upon the carpet to have made an old woman happy for a day.... Later, an orderly from Headquarters in the Rue de l’Assyrie, brought from the younger Dunoisse’s Chief--a purple-haired, fiery-faced personage, with whom the reader has already rubbed shoulders,--the intimation that, pending official inquiry into a certain regrettable event, not more broadly particularized in words, the Assistant-Adjutant of the 999th of the Line would be expected to return to his duties forthwith.

And within an hour of the receipt of this notification Dunoisse was the recipient of a little, lilac-tinted note, regretting in graceful terms that the writer had most unhappily been absent from home when M. Dunoisse had called; inviting him to a reception, to be held upon the following evening at the Rue de Sèvres, Number Sixteen....

That delicately-hued, subtly-perfumed little billet, penned in thick, brilliant violet ink in a small, clear, elegantly-characteristic handwriting, signed “Henriette de Roux.”

Ah! surely there was something about it that made Hector, in the very act of tossing it into the fire, pause and inhale its perfume yet again, and slip it between the pages of a blue-covered Manual of Cavalry Tactics that lay in a litter of gloves, studs, collars, and razors, small change and handkerchiefs, cigars and toothpicks upon the Empire dressing-table whose mirror had framed the wild, dark, brilliant beauty of the Princess Marie-Bathilde.... The features it gave back now, clear, salient, striking, vigorous in outline as those representing the young Bacchus upon a coin of old Etruria, were very like the mother’s. And their beauty, evoking the careless, admiring comment of a coquette, had stained the pavement before the Hotel of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with blood that was to darken it for many a day to come.

* * * * *

The invitation, coming from such a source, could not be declined--must be regarded as an order. Dunoisse wrote a line of acceptance, dispatched it by his soldier-valet,--and went out.

A pretentious mourning-hatchment, displaying the splashy arms of Marshal Dunoisse, cheek-by-jowl with the princely blazon of Von Widinitz, upon a black-and-white lozenge over the hall-door, arrested his eye as he descended the paternal doorsteps; a replica of this egregious advertisement gave him a cold shudder as he passed through the gates of the courtyard on foot, for Djelma, though nearly recovered of her hurts, was still in the hands of the veterinary, and the poor young officer, son of the wealthy owner of well-filled stables, must walk, or ride his servant’s horse.

The streets of Paris still ran thick with the human flood that ebbed and flowed, surged and swirled, roaring as it went with a voice like the voice of the sea.... Strange shapes, dislodged by Red Revolution from the bottom-sludge, floated on the surface of the muddy torrent; their terrible faces bit themselves into the memory as they drifted by, as aquafortis bites into the copper-plate. Bands of military students and Guardes Mobiles patroled the upheaved streets--National Guards fraternized with the people--the little white tents still studded the camping-grounds of the troops on the great public squares; the limes and acacias of the boulevards, ruthlessly cut down to stumps; barked by the hungry troop-horses tethered to them, showed naked in the wintry sunshine; while squadrons of mounted chasseurs and detachments of Municipal Guards patroled the thoroughfares, and Commissaries of Police bore down on stationary groups and coagulated masses of the vast crowd:

“Circulate! In the Name of the Republic!”--with little more success than when they had adjured it in the name of fallen Majesty and impotent Law, to roll upon its way.

* * * * *

Dunoisse went to the Barracks in the Rue de l’Assyrie, and later to the Club of the Line, prepared for a chilly, even hostile reception. He met with elaborate cordiality from his equals, condescension as elaborate on the part of his superiors.

The Dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies, the abolition of the Chamber of Peers, was in every mouth; the political convictions and personal qualifications of the members constituting the New Provisional Administration were discussed with heat and eagerness: the sporting odds given and taken upon and against the chances of the exiled Claimant to the Imperial Throne being permitted to return to France and canvass for election. Some said: “It will never be permitted,” and others: “He has already been communicated with,” and others even more positive announced: “He is now upon his way!”...

But not a single reference was made to the affair of the fusillade at the Foreign Ministry, though a chance hint, dropped amidst the Babel, gave Dunoisse to understand that the Conservative Republican and Democratic newspapers had not been so merciful.

Lives there the man who could have refrained, under the circumstances, from hunting through the files of the past week? It was a leading article in the Avénement that first caught the young man’s eye, and what a whip of scorpions the anonymous writer wielded! What terrible parallels were drawn, what crushing epithets hurled at the unlucky head of the victim. More than ever, as the fiery sentences burned their way from his eyes to his brain, Hector Dunoisse knew himself the well-scourged whipping-top of Destiny, the shuttlecock of adverse chances, the pincushion of Fate.... And as though in mockery, yet another burden of shame must be piled upon the overladen shoulders: a brief, contemptuous paragraph in the Ordre caught the young man’s eye, referring in jesting terms to that pretentious mourning-hatchment mounted over the door of the paternal mansion ... touching lightly on the vexed question of Succession, hinting that the Catholics of the Bavarian Principality of Widinitz were being stirred up by the agents of “a certain wealthy, unscrupulous impostor and intriguer” to rebel against the nomination, by the Council of the Germanic Federal Convention, of the Lutheran Archduke Luitpold of Widinitz, nephew of the departed Prince, as Regent.... And heavy clouds of anger and resentment gathered upon Dunoisse’s forehead as he read.

They darkened upon him still when the night closed in, and he went home to his lonely rooms. Nor were they lightened by the hour that saw him, in the uniform of ceremony, and with that mourning-band upon the sleeve of the dark blue full-dress uniform frock, that the Princess Marie-Bathilde’s son could not deny to the memory of her father, pitching and tossing in a hired cabriolet over the upheaved pavements of the Paris streets. On his way to the Rue de Sèvres, where in a stately suite of apartments sufficiently near the Rue de l’Assyrie--once forming part of the ancient Cistercian convent of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, the de Roux were established with some degree of splendor; visited by certain of the lesser luminaries of the great world, and receiving the cream of military society.

You saw Dunoisse dismiss his deplorable conveyance at the tall grilled gates of the Abbaye. In the exterior building, upon the left-hand side of the courtyard as one entered, were situated, upon the ground-floor, the apartments of the de Roux.... In a suite of poorly-furnished, stately, paneled chambers upon the floor above, Madame Récamier was slowly dying, haloed still by the unblemished virtue that had won the respect of the Emperor Napoleon--beautiful yet even in blindness and decay--clinging to life by the last strand of a friendship too pure and tender to bear the name of love.

The green Venetian shutters of that row of first-floor windows were closed, all save one; the fold of a green silk curtain stirred in the chill February breeze, a solitary lamp upon a table made a cocoon-shaped patch of light against the somber darkness within. A worn exquisite profile, pearly-pale as the new moon’s, with a black fillet bound over the eyes, showed against the background of shadow--a man’s hand, ivory-white, and so emaciated that the heavy seal-rings on the third finger hung there like hoops upon a grace-stick, drew the curtain and closed the shutters, as the firm elastic step of Youth and Hope sounded on the flagstones, crossed the threshold below....

Who would spy upon one of these last evenings with Chateaubriand? In July she was to follow him to the tomb.

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XXXI

Dunoisse, to the ring of his dress-spurs upon the pavement, passed in by the glazed double-doors. A somnolent porter, rousing out of his chair, admitted the guest by yet another glass door to a handsome vestibule upon the ground floor, an orderly-sergeant of the 999th saluted his officer, received his cloak, shako, and sword, delivered him to a footman in light green livery with silver cords and shoulder-knots, whose roseate calves preceded him across an ante-room of stately proportions towards a high doorway, draped with curtains of deep crimson velvet tasseled with gold. Brilliant light streamed from between the curtains, warm fragrance was borne to the nostrils of the visitor with the hum of voices; the white shoulders of ladies, their ringleted heads wreathed, in the charming fashion of the day, with natural flowers, moved across the shining vista, companioned by the figures of men in uniform, or lay-wear of the latest mode and most fashionable shades of color; or displaying the severe black frock-coat and tricolored rosette of the New Provisional Government of France.

A man thus distinguished was speaking, as the footman raised the crimson curtain and signed to Dunoisse to pass beneath. A cessation in the stream of general chatter had conveyed that the speaker was worth hearing. And in the dignity of the massively-proportioned figure, crowned by a leonine head of long waved auburn hair, in the deep melodious tones of the voice that rose and fell, swelled or sank at the will of the accomplished orator, there was something that fascinated the imagination and stirred the pulse.

“No, Madame, I do not despise Rank or Wealth,” he said to a seated lady of graceful shape, whose face, like his own, was turned from the doorway and invisible to the entering guest. “But though I do not despise, I fear them. They should be handled as ancient chemists handled subtle poisons, wearing glass masks and gloves of steel.”

No one answered. The speaker continued:

“That Kings have been noble and heroic--that Emperors have reigned who were virtuous and honest men, can be proved from the pages of History. Their reigns are threads of gold in a fabric of inky black. The reverence in which we hold their names proves them to have been prodigies. They, by some miracle of God or Nature--were not as evil as they might have been.... For, even as the handle of the racket used by the Eastern tyrant had been impregnated, by the skill of the wise physician, with healing agents; the juice of medicinal herbs that, entering by the pores, cleansed, purified, regenerated the leper’s corrupted flesh: so in the folds of the ermine mantle there lurks deadly contagion: so, in the grasp of the jeweled truncheon of State there is a corroding poison that eats to the heart and brain.”

The mellow-voiced orator ceased, and the silence into which his closing sentences had fallen was broken by the announcement of Dunoisse’s name. The recent speaker glanced round as it was uttered. Only to one man could that pale, close-shaven, classic mask belong; only one brain could house behind the marble rampart of that splendid forehead, or speak in the flashing glances of those gold-bronze eagle eyes. It was Victor Hugo; and the thrill a young man knows in the recognition of a hero, or the discovery of a demigod, went through Dunoisse, as amidst the rustling of silks and satins, the fluttering of fans and the agitation of many heads, curled, or ringleted, or braided, that turned to stare, he moved over the pale Aubusson carpet towards the seated figure of the lady, indicated by the footman’s whisper as the mistress of the house.

How soon the demigod was to be forgotten in the revelation of the goddess....

As the writer of the lilac-colored note rose up, with supple indolent grace, amidst a whispering purplish-gray sea of crisp delicate silken flounces,--held out a small white hand flashing with diamonds and rubies--murmured something vaguely musical about being charmed;--as Dunoisse, having bent over the extended hand with the required degree of devotion, raised his head from the ceremonious salute, a pair of eyes that were, upon that particular night, hazel-green as brook-water in shadow, looked deep into his own.... And the heart beating behind the young soldier’s Algerian medals knocked heavily once, twice, thrice!--as the knock behind the curtain of the Théâtre Français when the curtain is about to rise upon the First Act, and the strong young throat encircled by the stiff black-satin-covered leather stock, and the collar with the golden Staff thunderbolt, knew a choking sensation, and the blood hummed loudly in his ears.

A flame, subtle, electric, delicate and keen, had passed into him with the look of those eyes, with the touch of the little velvet hand that was fated to draw, what wild melody, what frenzied discords from the throbbing hearts of men....

And the gates of his heart opened wide. And with a burst of triumphant music Henriette passed in,--and they were shut and locked and barred behind her.

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XXXII

Ah! Henriette, what shall I say of you? How with this halting pen make you live and be for others as you exist and are for me?

There are men and women born upon this earth, who, walking lightly, yet print deep, ineffaceable footprints upon the age in which they live. The world is better for them; their breath has purified the atmosphere they existed in.... Ignorant of their predestination as they are, every word and act of theirs bears the seal of the Divine Intelligence. They were sent to do the work of the Most High.

And there are men and women who appear and vanish like shooting stars or falling meteors. Their path is traced in ruin and devastation, as the path of the tornado, as the path of the locust is. And having accomplished their appointed work, they pass on like the destroying wind, like the winged devourer: leaving prone trees and ruined homes, wrecked ships, stripped fields--Death where there was Life.

* * * * *

Think of Henriette as one of the fatal forces, a velvet-voiced, black-haired woman with a goddess’s shape and a skin of cream, such little hands and feet as might have graced an Andalusian lady,--with mobile features--the mouth especially being capable of every variety of expression--and with great eyes of changing color, sometimes agate-brown, sometimes peridot-green, sometimes dusky gray. Shaping her image thus in words, I have conveyed to you nothing. No sorceress is unveiled, no wonder shown.

In the old, old days when the Sons of Light walked upon earth with the children of men, some seraph fell for the sake of a woman like this. From the seed of that union sprang all the Henriettes.... You may know them by the tattered rags of glory that trail behind them; by the pale flickering aureole, no brighter than a will-o’-the wisp or glow-worm’s light, that hovers over the white brow....

About that brow of Henriette the willful hair rose in a wave-crest of delicate spraying blackness; curled over, shadowing the pearly forehead and blue-veined temples and the little shell-like ears, as though the waves were about to break; then rolled back and twined into a labyrinthine knot of silken coilings from which two massive curls escaped, to wander at their will. It was a face of lights and shadows; in their continual play you forgot to criticise its features. But they were eloquent, from the wide jetty arches of the eyebrows, to the silken-lashed languid eyelids, purplish-tawny as the petals of fading violets over the liquid, lustrous, changeful eyes. Eyes that mocked and laughed at you even as they wooed you; and mourned and wept for you even as they tempted and lured.

“Ah! do you indeed love me?” they seemed to say. “Is it so? Then most unhappy--poor, poor friend!--are you! Because I am of those women who are born to cause much misery. For we sting to desire without intention, and provoke to pursuit without the will. And ‘No’ is a word we have never learned to say.”

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XXXIII

It seemed to Dunoisse that he had always known her, always waited for her to reveal herself just in this manner, as she rose up amidst the crisping rustle of innumerable little flounces, outstretched the white arm partly veiled by the scarf of black flowered lace--shed the brilliance of her look upon him, and smiled like a naughty angel or a sweet mischievous child, saying in a soft voice that was strange to his ears and yet divinely familiar:

“So we meet at last?”

He found no better reply than:

“You were not at home, Madame, when I paid my visit of ceremony.”

“I detest visits of ceremony,” she said, and her tone robbed the words of harshness.

“Do you then turn all unknown visitors from your doors?” Dunoisse queried. Her smile almost dazzled him as she returned:

“No, Monsieur ... I turn them into friends.” Adding, as he stood confounded at the vast possibilities her words suggested: “And I have wished to know you.... My husband has told me much.... But in these times of disturbance, how is it possible to be social? One can only remain quiescent, and look on while History is made.”

“I have been quiescent enough, Heaven knows!--for nearly a week past,” said Dunoisse, “without even the consolation of looking on.”

Her shadowy glance was full of kindness.

“I know!... Poor boy!” She added quickly: “Do not be offended at my calling you a boy. I am twenty-five--nearly!... Old enough to be your elder sister, Monsieur.... Have you sisters? If so, I should like to call them friends.”

“I had one sister,” said Dunoisse, his eyes upon a night-black curl that lay upon an ivory shoulder. “She died very young--a mere infant.”

“Poor little angel!”

Henriette de Roux rather objected to children--thought them anything but little angels. But her white bosom heaved and fell, and a glittering tear trembled an instant on a sable eyelash. And so infectious is sentiment, that Hector, who dedicated a regret to the memory of the departed cherub on an average once a year, echoed her sigh.

* * * * *

The silver-coated roach, contemplating the dangling bait of the angler, is quite aware that for innumerable generations the members of his family have succumbed to the attraction of the pill of paste that conceals the barbed hook. Yet he deliberately sucks it in, and is borne swiftly upwards, leaving in the round-eyed family circle a gap that is soon refilled.

That tear of Henriette’s was the bait. When her sigh was echoed, it was to the feminine fisher of men significant as the slow, deliberate curtsey of the float is to the angler for the slimy children of the river. Variable as a fay in a rainbow, she smiled dazzlingly upon the young man; and said, touching him lightly upon the arm with her Spanish fan and leaning indolently back in the fauteuil that was almost completely hidden beneath the rippling wavelets of her purplish-gray flounces:

“Look round. Tell me what flower is most in evidence to-night?”

Thus bidden, Dunoisse turned his glance questingly about. A moment gave the answer. The corsage of every lady present, no matter of what costly hothouse blooms her bouquet and wreath might be composed, had its bunch of violets; the coat of every second man displayed the Napoleonic emblem. His eyes went back to meet an intent look from Henriette. She said:

“You do not wear that flower, Monsieur!”

He returned her look with the answer:

“My military oath was of allegiance to a King. And though the King be discrowned and the Republic claims my services, I know nothing of an Empire--at least, not yet.”

The irony stung. She bit her scarlet lip, and said, with a bright glance that triumphed and challenged:

“Unless the winds and tides have conspired against us, the Emperor will be in Paris to-night.”

“Indeed!” The reports bandied, the bets made at the Club, came back upon Dunoisse’s memory. He said:

“Then Prince Louis-Napoleon has determined to risk the step?”

She answered with energy:

“He is of a race that think little of risking. The son of Marshal Dunoisse should know that.... Ah! how it must grieve your father to know you indifferent to the great traditions of that noble family!”

Hector answered her with a darkening forehead:

“My father congratulated me upon good service rendered to the cause of Imperialism--only yesterday.” He added as Madame de Roux opened her beautiful eyes inquiringly: “He is of the comprehensive majority who hold me guilty of that deed of bloodshed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He----”

Dunoisse broke off. She had become so pale that he knew a shock of terror. Deep shadows filled the caves whence stared a pair of haunted eyes. There were hollows in her cheeks--lines about her mouth that he had never dreamed of.... A broken whisper came from the stiff white lips that said:

“Do not seem to notice.... It is the ... heat!...”

Hector, exquisitely distressed, forced his gaze elsewhere. Long seconds passed, during which he could hear her breathing; then the voice said:

“Thanks!... You may look at me now!”

He found her still pale, but without that bleak look of horror that had appalled him. She tried to smile with lips that had partly regained their hue. She asked, averting her gaze from him:

“Your father.... What did you answer to him when he--said that--that you had rendered good service to the Imperial cause?”

“I told him,” Dunoisse answered her, “that I could testify to my innocence of that guilty deed before Heaven. And that I should assert it before the tribunals of men.”

She murmured in a tone that gave the impression of breathlessness:

“There will be an official inquiry?”

Hector returned:

“This evening, when I returned to my quarters to change my dress, I received a summons to appear before a Court-Martial of Investigation, to be held at the Barracks in three days’ time. Perhaps with this cloud hanging over me I should not have accepted your invitation? But I thought ... I imagined ... you could not fail to know!”

She said, with a transient gleam of mockery in her glance, though her eyebrows were knitted as though in troubled reflection:

“Husbands do not tell their wives everything. And I am an Imperialist, like your father.... How should I blame you for an act that counts to us? But we will speak of this later.... Here is Colonel de Roux....”

Dunoisse’s eyes involuntarily sought and found de Roux. The Comtesse made a signal with her Spanish fan. And as if a wire had been jerked, the purple-haired, blood-shot-eyed, elderly, rouged dandy, the center of a knot of ladies to whom he was playing the gallant, excused himself and crossed to his wife’s side. He had been all cordiality and civility that morning in his office at the Barracks in the Rue de l’Assyrie; he was cordial and civil now, as he insinuated his arm through Dunoisse’s and led him this way and that amongst his guests, presenting him to ladies, introducing men.

* * * * *

Limited as his opportunities had been of moving in those social circles to which his mother’s rank, no less than the Marshal’s wealth, would have given Dunoisse admission, he displayed no awkwardness--was not handicapped by the shyness that is the young man’s bane. His perfect muscular development lent easiness and grace to his movements; the open candor and simplicity that characterized his regard and address might have been subtlety, they disarmed criticism so completely and won upon prejudice so well.

The gathering in the de Roux’ drawing-room represented all ranks and classes of Society, severely excepting the exclusive circle of the Faubourg Saint Germain. There were Dukes of Empire creation with their Duchesses, there were Peers of the Monarchy now defunct. Politicians, financiers, editors, and dandies rubbed shoulders with stars of the stage, and comets of the concert-room; painters great and small, and fashionable men of letters. You saw the youngest of all famous poets with his radiant blue eyes, slim upright figure, auburn locks and beard, and unquenchable air of youth. And Chopin, animated, and glowing with the joy of life, illuminated with the fire of genius, hectic with the pulmonary disease that was to kill him a year later; and Liszt, iron gray, fantastically thin, at the height of his infatuation for Madame Daniel Stern. You saw Delacroix in the first bloom of success, and Ingrés, long established on his throne of fame, gray-haired and stout, robust and plain, commonplace until he opened his mouth to speak--lifted his hands in gesture. And above all towered the massive figure and leonine head of the man who had been speaking when Dunoisse had been announced.

* * * * *

But the majority of the male guests belonged to what Louis Napoleon was afterwards to dub the “cream of fast and embarrassed Colonels,” and many of the women were of the dashing, dazzling, voluptuous type that de Musset had immortalized by a single word. The lionne of 1848 was ere long to be transformed into the cocodette of the Second Empire, and in the process was to lose the grace that is woman’s womanliest attribute, and shed the last feather of the angel’s wing.

* * * * *

Free from self-consciousness as he was, Dunoisse, with the taint of the blood shed upon the Boulevard des Capucines hot upon his memory, was not slow in awakening to the fact that the majority of the women present regarded him with peculiar interest; and that many of their male companions turned eyeglasses his way. Questions, answers, comments, dealing with the abhorrent subject came to his ears as he moved forwards, bruised like pelting hailstones, stabbed with hornet-stings.... Several of the ladies curtseyed ... some of the gentlemen bowed low; more than one feathered dowager styled him “Serene Highness” and “Monseigneur.”... And with a rush of angry blood to his temples and forehead, darkening still further his tawny-reddish skin, and adding to the brilliance of his black-diamond eyes, the young man realized that the fact of Paris being in the throes of Red Revolution had not deprived, in such eyes as these, the newspaper-mooted question of the Widinitz Succession of its vulgar charm. And that, on the strength of the hateful episode at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in combination with the intrigues of the Marshal, Sub-Adjutant Hector Dunoisse had become a personage to fawn upon and flatter, to invite and entertain.

* * * * *

The band of crape about his sleeve began to burn him. The now overcrowded drawing-rooms seemed suffocatingly hot. Madame de Roux had become the invisible, attractive nucleus of a crowd of civilian coats and blazing uniforms.... Dunoisse, alternately tempted by the thought of escape, teased by the desire to join that magic circle, was enduring the civilities of a group of ogling ladies and grinning exquisites with what outward patience he could muster, when he encountered, through a gap in the wall of heads and shoulders, the gaze of a pair of golden-bronze eagle eyes, glowing beneath a vast white forehead crowned with pale flowing locks of auburn hair.

For an instant he forgot his boredom, his desire to regain the side of Madame de Roux, or to escape from the perfumed, overheated rooms to the space and freedom of the Club, or the familiar loneliness of his rooms in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. He was grateful when a surge of the ever-thickening crowd of guests brought him within touch of the plainly-dressed, perfectly-mannered gentleman who was the elected chief and generalissimo of the Free Lances of Romance. But, as Dunoisse gained the Master’s side, the tall rounded shape of Madame de Roux swept by, leaning on the arm of a white-haired general officer in a brilliant Staff uniform ablaze with decorations. She never turned her face.... The night of her luxuriant tresses, the pale oval of her cheek, the dusky sweep of her eyelashes stamped themselves anew upon the young man’s consciousness, as her draperies, shimmering purplish gray as Oriental pearl through their veiling of black Spanish laces, swept across his feet. He felt once more that heavy knocking in the breast as though the curtain were going up upon the play.... And the scent of violets came to him with the breeze of her passing, strongly as though he stooped above the wet, dark, fragrant clusters in some woodland glade.... A knot of the purple blossoms had fallen from amongst her laces as she went by. They lay close to his foot. He stooped and picked them up with a hand that was not quite steady. And as he mechanically lifted the violets to his face, still looking after the swaying, smoothly-gliding figure, dwelling upon the beauty of a creamy nape upon which rested great coils of night-black hair, pierced with a diamond arrow, one heavy curl escaping, hiding in the delicate hollow between the rounded ivory shoulders, vanishing in the berthe of lace that framed their loveliness, he started, for Hugo spoke. The deep melodious voice said:

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XXXIV

“It is the classic flower of Venus as well as the badge of Imperialism. And--he who receives it from so fair a hand and does not wear it must needs be very cold or greatly courageous.” He added, as Dunoisse’s brilliant black eyes met his own: “I wear no violets, you see. Yet had she offered them....”

He gave a whimsical, expressive shrug. Dunoisse found himself saying:

“These were not given to me, but dropped in passing.”

The great master’s laugh, mirthful, mellow, genial, responded with the words:

“Admit at least that the flowers were dropped most opportunely.”

“Monsieur, if the knot of violets were purposely detached,” said Dunoisse, “then they undoubtedly were meant for you!”

But he made no offer to resign the blossoms, and Hugo laughed again.

“They were not meant for me. Have no fear. I have drunk of a sweet philter that renders men proof against enchantment. I kissed my child, sleeping in its cradle.... My wife said: God keep thee! when I left home to-night.”

The manner had a tinge of grandiloquence, the words did not ring quite true. Dunoisse, like all the rest of the world, knew that the boasted philter was not the infallible preventive.... The scrap of tinsel that would sometimes show among the ermined folds of the kingly mantle peeped out with a vengeance now.... And yet the man possessed a royal, noble nature; and a personality so simply impressive that, if he had chosen to sit upon a three-legged milking stool instead of a carved chair upon a tapestried dais, it would have seemed, not only to his followers, a throne.

He went on to speak of the beauty of the lady of the salon, thrilled Dunoisse by a hint of romance,--breaking off to say:

“But for you, who wear the uniform of M. de Roux’s regiment, there can be nothing new to hear about Madame?”

Did a drop of subtle, cynical acid mingle with the honey of the tone?... Dunoisse was conscious of the tang of bitterness even as he answered:

“Monsieur, I was recalled from Blidah to join the 999th of the Line barely a month ago. And since then I have been absent on leave in England. I had the honor of meeting Madame de Roux for the first time to-night. She interests me indescribably. Pray tell me what you know of her....”

Hugo said: “Have a care! She wears the Violet in her bosom and the Bee upon her lips. And in the perfume of the flower there is delirium--in the honey of the insect a sting.”

Dunoisse said, hardly knowing that he spoke the words aloud:

“Divine madness, exquisite pain!...”

Hugo returned with a sphinx-like smile and a curious intonation:

“You have the intrepidity of youth, with its rashness. Be it so! We must all live and learn. And so you are but newly from Algeria!--that explains why you have the coloring, though not why you should possess the shape and features of an Arab of the Beni-Raten--reared in one of the hawk’s-nest fort-villages of Kabylia--nourished on mountain air. Ah!--so you have ridden down the wild partridge on the plains at the foot of Atlas, and felt on your eyes the kiss of the breeze of the Desert, and paused to breathe and rest beneath the thatch of some native hut shadowed by date-palms or sycamores, built beside streams that flow through hollowed trunks of trees. And women as black as roasted coffee-berries have brought you whey and millet-cakes, and platters of dried figs, and ripe mulberries in their dark hands decked with gold and ivory rings.”

So vivid was the picture evoked that Dunoisse knew the yearning of home-sickness, wished himself back again in the little house at Blidah, even to be bored by the trivial gossip of the garrison ladies, even to be teased by the persistent drub and tinkle of gazelle-eyed Adjmeh’s tambur. And the magician’s voice went on:

“You have asked of Madame de Roux.... Her father was a grandee of Spain and famous general of guerillas. He was killed during the counter-Revolutionary operations in Catalonia in 1822.... My father knew him and his lovely wife, who died of grief within a few years of the death of her brave husband.... She was a Miss Norah Murphy, an Irishwoman. And when you say that you say all. For that wet green island of the mystic threefold leaf and the deep echoing sea-caves, and the haunting melodies, is the spot of earth whereon the rebellious Angels of both sexes were doomed by the Divine Decree to dwell until the Judgment Day. They are the Tuatha da Danaan--the Fairy Race of whom one must not speak unless as ‘the good people’; whose slender, handsome, green-clad men woo earthly women and lure them away. Madame de Roux possesses a strain of that blood. It is to be traced in the daughters of a family for centuries--I say nothing of the sons.... And its gifts are the voice of music, the touch that thrills; the eyes that weep and laugh together, the smile that charms and maddens, and the kiss that enthralls and beguiles....”

“They are hers?” came from Dunoisse, as if in interrogation, and then repeating the words with an accent of conviction: “They are hers!” he said, a rush of new sensations crowding in upon him, with the perfume streaming from the tiny knot of purple blossoms fading in his hand.

“They are hers,” Hugo answered. “They were hers when M. de Roux met and married her: they were hers when as a bride of seventeen she found herself established as lady-paramount and reigning Queen of his regiment, in garrison at Ham. Life is dull in a military fortress, you will agree, to anyone but a gambler. For distraction one turns naturally to games of risk and chance....”

He smiled, but his smile was enigmatical:

“The most fascinating of all these is the game of Political Intrigue and Secret Correspondence. From a prisoner, interned for life within the Fortress, the young wife learned to play that game. Her teacher had been a professional player, ruined through an ill-calculated move at Boulogne--an attempt ending in grotesque failure!”

Dunoisse knew that by the ruined player was meant the Pretender to the Throne Imperial of France.

“The beautiful Henriette was an apt pupil; she quickly mastered the First Gambit. I have heard it said that the pawn sacrificed on that occasion was--the lady’s husband, but whether that be truth or scandal I do not pretend to know.... But six years later her teacher crossed the drawbridge in the blouse and fustians of a bricklayer, with a plank upon his shoulder. And since then”--the pale features of the speaker were inscrutable--“his pupil has kept her hand in. For Intrigue is a game that a woman comes to play at last for excitement, though at first she may have played for love.”

He ceased and began to laugh, and said, still laughing, while Dunoisse thrilled with pity, anger and yet another emotion:

“It would be strange if so lovely and seductive a woman could conceive a genuine passion for a little unsuccessful adventurer who pronounces ‘joy’ as ‘choy,’ and ‘transport’ as ‘dransbord,’ and who has a long body and short legs. Though, to have suffered for an idea, even as false as the Idea Imperial, adds stature to the dwarfish and dignity to the vulgar, even in the eyes of other men. Besides, he was a prisoner ... unfortunate and unhappy.... Why should she not have loved him after all?”

Dunoisse said, with tingling muscles and frowning brows:

“Monsieur, do you hold that women are incapable of chivalry?”

* * * * *

He had raised his voice, and the clear ringing utterance made itself distinctly heard above the buzz of general conversation. And as he spoke a silken rustle went past behind him, and a breath of violets came to his nostrils.... But Hugo was replying to the query in the grandiose vein that characterized him....

* * * * *

“No, young man!--since from my place in the House of Deputies I beheld the Duchess d’Orleans stand up single-handed against a whole nation in defense of the rights of a weak child.” He added: “In days such as these the diligent student of Human Nature--the literary artist who would add a new gloss to the Book of Mankind, discovers a pearl every hour he lives. Have I not seen within the space of one week a King hooted from the Tuileries, a throne consumed by fire, a Constitution tumbled into the dustbin, and the New Republic of France rise, radiant and regenerate from the ashes, and the dust and blood of Insurrection? And I am here to-night because I seek, at the first signal of his arrival, to hasten to offer the hand of brotherhood to a Napoleon Bonaparte who has freed his chained eagle, fettered his ambitions, and asks nothing better than to set the torch of Liberty to the pyre of Empire.” He added, as by an afterthought: “And also, I am here because I wish to look upon the face of Cain.”

The unexpected peroration hissed like Greek fire upon sea-water. Dunoisse stammered in bewilderment:

“Pardon, Monsieur! You said ... the face of Cain...?”

The answer came:

“Monsieur, in the interests of the public who subscribe to the Avénement, I should sincerely thank you if you would point out to me that brother-officer of yours who caused the men of his command to fire upon the people assembled before the Hotel of the Foreign Ministry. Having looked upon his face, my desire will be gratified. I shall have seen Cain!”

The words of dreadful irony fell like the iron-weighted thong of the knout upon bare flesh, lacerating, excoriating.... Hector Dunoisse, livid under his ruddy skin, rent between rage and shame, held speechless by the sense of the utter uselessness of denial, could only meet the piercing eagle-eyes of the wielder of the scourge. And infinitely wounding was the dawning of suspicion in those eyes, and worse the conviction, and worst of all the scorn....

Dunoisse had imagined, when he felt himself the target of greedy, curious glances and shrill piercing whispers, that this great man, aware of the undeserved, unmerited accusation under which he writhed, had looked at him with comprehension and sympathy. Now he found himself bereft of these; the kindness had died out of the face, if it had ever really beamed there, and the vast white forehead rose before him like a rampart with an enemy behind it. His manhood shrank and dwindled. He found himself saying in the voice of a schoolboy summoned before the pedagogue for a fault:

“Monsieur Hugo, I thought you had heard all ... knew all.... Your look seemed to say so, to-night--when first it encountered mine....”

The other answered with wounding irony:

“Previously to your entrance, the well-known fact that certain ambitious Imperialist intriguers have put forward a claim of Hereditary Succession to the feudal throne of a small Bavarian principality, had formed the topic of a brief discussion in which I took my share. Upon your arrival you were indicated to me as the human peg on which these adventurers hang their hopes. I was quite unaware of the personal claim you have established upon the esteem of your fellow-beings by the wholesale butchery of the Rue des Capucines.”

He added, with a laugh that was vitriol poured into Dunoisse’s wounds:

“I am not ignorant that you have a certain reputation as a fencer and a duelist. It will be useless to challenge me, let me assure you!... I am sufficiently courageous to be called a coward for the sake of my children and my country, dearer even than they.” He scanned the youthful, quivering face with even more deliberate intention.... “You are even younger than I judged at first,” he said. “What may not be looked for from the maturity of such a formidable being!... Paraphrasing Scripture, I am tempted to exclaim: ‘If you are as you are in the green tree, what may you not become in the dry!’ Personally, I am, in my character of poet and dramatist, your debtor. For every classical student knows that Tiberius was magnificently handsome--that the base and bloody Caligula was of a beauty that dazzled the eyes. But--who has pictured Judas otherwise than as a red-haired, blear-eyed humpback? Who has imagined Cain as the reverse of swart, shaggy, hideous and terrible? No one until now! But when, after years of study and preparation, I compose in Alexandrine verse the drama of the Greatest of all Betrayals--rely upon it that the Judas of Hugo will be more beautiful than John!”

His laughter froze and lacerated Dunoisse’s burning ears like pelting hailstones. It ceased; and, touched in spite of himself by the mute bleeding anguish in the young, haggard face, he said roughly:

“Why do you not speak, sir? Why do you not defend yourself?”

Dunoisse’s palate was dry as ashes. He said with the despairing smile that drags the mouth awry:

“Monsieur, it would be useless. I have read your article in the Avénement. You condemned me before you heard.”

The golden flame of Hugo’s glance played over him like wildfire. The scrutiny endured but an instant. Then the master said, with a softening change of voice and face, holding out his hand:

“Young man, if you had been guilty of that crime you would be infinitely miserable. And, being innocent, you are most unhappy. For no living mortal, save myself, will believe you so!”

The hand-grasp was brief but significant. Next moment the giver was lost in the surging crowd of golden epaulets, flower-wreathed ringlets and well-powdered shoulders, Joinville cravats and curled heads of masculine hair.

The brilliantly-lighted rooms seemed to darken when the friendly face had turned away. Dunoisse, wearied and discouraged, began to think of taking leave. As he looked about for his hostess there was a bustle near the door. The agitation spread to the confines of the most distant room of the suite. Loud, eager voices were heard from the anteroom, the heavy crimson curtain was dragged back by no gentle hand.

A man in brilliant Staff uniform, the white-haired general officer who had gone by Dunoisse a few moments before with Madame de Roux upon his arm, appeared in the archway towards which the well-dressed mob now pressed and surged. His eyes shone--his face had the pallor of intense emotion and the radiance of unspeakable joy. He cried, in a loud, hoarse, rattling voice that carried from room to room like a discharge of grape-shot:

“Prince Louis Napoleon is in Paris! He has arrived at the Hôtel du Rhin!”

He tore his sword from the scabbard--held it gleaming high above his haggard, radiant head, and shouted in stentorian tones:

“Long live the Emperor!”

And the scented, well-dressed crowd, revivified by the utterance of that name of ancient magic, inspired by the breath of an immense enthusiasm, crazy with joy in the anticipation of what they knew not, echoed the shout:

“Long live the Emperor!”

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XXXV

France is the most womanly of all the nations. A man once possessed her who caused her such misery that she adored him as a god. He wrung the tears from her eyes, the blood from her veins, the gold from her coffers. He slew her sons in hecatombs, and yet she gave, and gave. And when a dwarfish being of devouring passions and colossal ambitions rose up and said: “I bear the dead man’s name. Worship me, living, now that he is no more!” she gave him all she had.

To these Imperialists, the exile who had returned was not Charles Louis Bonaparte, Prince-Pretender to the Imperial Throne. He was the Emperor. And as though he had been indeed the wearer of the little cocked hat and the gray surtout, they greeted the news of his return with a joy they themselves would barely have credited ten minutes before.

They laughed and wept tears of rapture that washed the paint from the faces of elderly belles and ancient dandies, and rinsed the old lees of vice and vanity and selfishness from their hearts. Friends and foes embraced; strangers exchanged hand-clasps and congratulations. The golden Age had come again. Napoleon was in Paris. And the hubbub of voices grew overwhelming, in the ceaseless reiteration of two words:

“The Emperor!--the Emperor!”

Hugo said, raising his magnificent voice so as to be heard plainly above the Babel:

“Messieurs the Representatives of the New Provisional Government, Monsieur Bonaparte has at length returned from England. Let us who, having confidence in his pledges, have voted in his favor, go and say to him: ‘How do you do?’”

And, followed by his fellow-wearers of black coats and tricolored scarfs, he went out quickly. Yet others pushed their way into the anteroom, and began to rummage for hats, coats, and cloaks. As the bustle of their departure reached its climax, Dunoisse was conscious of a breath of familiar fragrance. A silken rustle came behind him, and a soft voice reached his ear, saying:

“If only I dared follow them!”

It was Madame de Roux. And so bitter a spasm of jealousy clutched Dunoisse’s heart that he was shocked and confounded by the revelation of his own huge folly. Then, as the wood-flower’s perfume reached him in a stronger gust of sweetness, a whisper that thrilled said:

“Are you chivalrous?”

The voice added instantly:

“I overheard what you said just now.... Do not look round....”

Dunoisse stared straight before him. Rigid and immovable, he might have been taken for the colored image of an officer of piou-pious. Only his Algerian medals shook a little with the beating of his heart. And the voice came again. It said:

“Think of me what you will!... I must speak to you! Remain after the others have left.... Wait in the gray boudoir at the end of the drawing-room beyond this. Raise those violets to your face if you agree: drop them if you refuse!...”

His hand shook as he lifted the knot of drooping blossoms, pretending to inhale their vanished scent. He heard her whisper:

“Thanks!” and the rustle of her silks and laces--distinguishable to him through the swishing and billowing and crackling of a sea of feminine fripperies--passed on. And footmen with baskets of champagne and silver trays of glasses, light as bubbles, began to circulate through the crowd; and the explosion of corks, the gurgling of the foamy wine, the pledging of loyal toasts and the clinking of glasses heralded the conversion of a festival of sentiment into a lively night.

Amidst the popping, clinking and toasting, Dunoisse passed from the larger drawing-room into the smaller, less crowded salon beyond, and presently found himself in the little boudoir.

It was a charming, cosy nest with purple-gray silken hangings, its ebony furniture upholstered with velvet of the same shade, the black, shining wood inlaid with silver wreaths, fillets and ribbons in the unfashionable Empire style.

Lofty in proportion to its size, it boasted a painted ceiling of nymphs and satyrs dancing in a woodland glade, exquisite enough to have been the work of Boucher. A bright fire burned in the fireplace of steel and bronze; tall double-doors left ajar gave a peep of a bedroom, perfumed and pink as the heart of a moss-rose; the deep chairs and wide divan suggested slumber. A black-and-tan King Charles’s spaniel of English breed, all floss-silk curls and blue ribbon bow, slept in a basket on the chinchilla hearthrug; there were books in ebony book-cases: a volume of the plays of de Musset, bound in white vellum, lay open upon an ottoman; the “Fleurs du Mal” of Baudelaire peeped from a dainty work-basket from which a strip of ecclesiastically-patterned embroidery trailed; and violets in bowls of Sèvres and groups of the white narcissus in tall Venetian vases made the air heavily sweet.

It was a nest for confidences, a place for revelations and confessions. It contained no pictures beyond a few frames of miniatures, all masculine portraits by famous hands, and one fine full-length, life-sized oil-painting, within a massive carved and gilded frame of the period of the Regency; representing a voluptuously-beautiful woman, in the habit of a Cistercian nun, standing upon a daïs covered with blue-and-gold tapestry in a pattern of fleurs-de-lis. Behind her rose a marble altar, its Tabernacle, surmounted with a pointed arch and the Cross, towered overhead, and one white, dimpled hand of the fair woman grasped a Crucifix, and the other was outstretched in the act of taking from the altar a Crown of Thorns.... And at her feet, bare, ivory-white, daintily-small and pink-toed, were scattered kingly crowns and jeweled orbs and scepters. And from her loosened coif streamed golden tresses, and her proud uplifted eyes blazed, not with the heavenly fires of Divine Love, but with the lurid flames of Hell.... And in her Satanic pride and imperial arrogance of beauty she seemed to live; and send out subtle electric influences that dominated and swayed those who dwelt within the reach of them, not for good but for evil and misery, and the wreck of bodies and souls.

And Dunoisse looked at the portrait, and the red lips seemed to smile at him. And while they appeared to whisper “Stay!” unseen hands plucked at him, as though striving to drag him from the place; and a thin voice of warning fluttered like a cobweb at his inner ear, urging him to begone and lose no time about it. Perhaps wan Sister Thérèse de Saint François was praying for him in her cell at the Carmel of Widinitz. But all the champagne he had not tasted seemed boiling in his veins, and he gave back the smile of the proud, voluptuous, painted lips, and was drawing near to decipher an inscription on an ornamental scroll at the bottom of the Regency frame, when there was a rustle and whisper of silken draperies in the doorway, and he turned to meet the eyes of Henriette.

* * * * *

She was radiant now with triumph--she sparkled like a starry night in midwinter. She drew deep breaths as though she had been running, and lovely tremulous smiles hovered about her mouth. She lifted her little hands as the first bars of a waltz marvelously played upon a brilliant instrument, rang out, and the rhythmical sound of dancing feet began to mingle with the music and the gay din of chattering tongues, and said with a sign that bade him listen:

“Do you hear?--they are dancing over the grave of the Monarchy. They have turned my reception into a ball. What the Augustinian Sisters will say to me I cannot imagine!... The outer gate closes at eleven.... They may go on like this until day.... M. Chopin has volunteered to play for them.... He is mad, like everybody else to-night. Decidedly it is as well you came here without waiting.” She added, a little incoherently: “What times we live in!--what events may not happen now! Oh! that waltz, how it distracts me! How can he dare to play like that?”

She pressed her small white hands against her temples, lifting from them the weight of hair, and sank down, panting a little still, upon the gray velvet divan, saying:

“Ouf!--my head aches. What was it I wanted to say?--I have forgotten! Do sit down! Here, beside me--you will not crush my dress.... We are not likely to be disturbed.... M. de Roux has gone to the Hôtel du Rhin with General Montguichet and a dozen other gentlemen--the rest are engrossed with their partners. What I wished to say to you was--Take this advice as from an elder sister. When you are summoned to answer before the Court-Martial for that--affair of the Rue des Capucines----”

He had fixed his eyes on the beautiful mobile mouth. Was he deceived? Did he really hear it say:

“Say that you gave the order for the men to fire. It will be the wisest course. Oh!--I know what I am talking about! No harm will come to you! You understand me, do you not? Only admit it--do not deny!”

Dunoisse rose up from the divan as pale under his red skin as when Hugo had asked him to point out the modern parallel of the primal murderer, and said in ice-cold tones:

“I have already had the honor to point out to you, Madame, that I did not give the order!”

He vibrated with passionate resentment. What--under the guise of sisterly kindness, was he advised to leap the cliff?

But a face brimming with sweet penitence was lifted to his. She said, summoning her dimples to play by mere force of will, bidding her eyes gleam through a soft veil of dewiness:

“Do not be angry!--it was a stupid joke. Must one always be so serious with you? And--I am a little mad to-night, as I have told you. It is excusable.... Pray forgive me!--sit down again!”

She stretched out a little hand, its delicate fingers curling like tendrils. They touched his--his heart leaped as they clung. He sat down again. And the waltz, played by the master-hand, ebbed away, dying in waves of sensuous sweetness, and a Polish mazurka, after a peal of crescendo chords that shrieked with frantic merriment, sprang short-skirted and flourishing belled scarlet heels, from the bewitched instrument, to take its place. And Dunoisse, with throbbing senses, tore his eyes from the enthralling face, and raised them to meet the proud, voluptuous, defiant glance of the nun in the portrait. And her red lips seemed to say: “Why not?” He asked involuntarily:

“Who is she?”

Henriette’s soft voice answered, with a curious tone in it:

“Everyone who asks says ‘Who is she?’ as though she lived. But she died in 1743. The portrait used to hang over the fireplace in the Community Hall. I will not tell you how it comes to be where it is now--it is a secret. She who tramples upon those crowns and scepters was Louise Adelaide de Chartres, second daughter of the Regent Philippe d’Orléans. She became Abbess here when eighteen, and died Abbess of Chelles. She was divinely beautiful and of ungovernable passions.... The suite of immense rooms that were hers in the main building of the Abbaye are never used. They are always shut up, and no one ever goes into them alone.”

She added, with a strange laugh:

“It is considered dangerous, even in the daytime, to enter without a companion. The Sisters say that shrieks and the rattling of chains are heard there on certain nights in the year, and that the floors are found to be stained with new-shed blood. They think that her soul comes back there to expiate the acts of cruelty she perpetrated upon her nuns; and her terrible excesses, in frightful scourgings, and tortures such as cannot be conceived.”

Seeing Dunoisse’s look still fixed upon the portrait, she went on:

“She was a witch. She bewitched her lovers,--she has bewitched you--you cannot take away your eyes. Ah! if you do not recoil from the sight of her, knowing her to be so wicked, there should be hope for me! For I--oh!--how can I tell you?...”

She was weeping,--the shining tears were making their way between the fingers of the little hands she clasped over her eyes. Her white bosom heaved with sobs. And the mazurka, played by the mighty master, jerked and shrilled and leaped in spasms of frantic merriment, and men and women, intoxicated with pleasure and heated by wine, yielded themselves to the furious excitement of the dance. And Dunoisse was at the side of Henriette, pleading with her in a voice that shook with emotion, to be calmer!--and presently found himself possessed of one of the little hands. He won a glance, too, of eyes that shone out of a pale, tear-drenched face, like moss-agates seen through running water, and another by-and-by....

* * * * *

To shed real tears and be lovely still--what a gift of the fairies! They have it as a birthright, the Henriettes. My Aunt Julietta, crying her poor eyes out in the shadow of a four-post mahogany bedstead of British manufacture, with cabbage-rose-patterned chintz curtains, over a masculine profile discovered in the background of a colored fashion-plate in the month’s issue of The Lady’s Mentor, and supposed to bear a soul-rending resemblance to one who was to be for ever nameless, inspirer of an early love that had bloomed in a railway carriage, and shed its leaves as the train snorted its way out of Dullingstoke Junction--was not a pretty or pathetic spectacle. With her tip-tilted nose thickened by the false catarrh of tears--her slender frame convulsed with the recurrent hiccough of hysteria--what masculine eye would have lingered upon my aunt?

But Henriette and her sisters can ride on the whirlwind of the emotions, without disarranging a fold of their draperies,--go through whole tragedies of despair without reddening an eyelid,--sorrow beautifully without spoiling the romance of a situation with one grotesque blast upon the nose. This Henriette said, lifting a sweet quivering face and drowned eyes to Dunoisse’s agitated countenance:

“Oh! let me cry,--it eases the heart!--and listen, for you must believe me!...”

Voices sounded beyond the threshold, the door-handle was rattled loudly. As the door opened, Henriette turned with a rapid, supple movement, and said, indicating the portrait above the fireplace with a steady hand:

“As you remark, Monsieur, Madame d’Orléans did not pass her time in saying Paternosters.... But it is said that she repented, and died in a state of grace.”

She added:

“Perhaps she bewitched the priest who confessed her into granting absolution?... But no!... One cannot be irresistible on one’s dying bed.... And Death is frightful.... I have always dreaded it!... Could you kiss lips that are turning into clay?... For me, I should never muster courage!...” A real shudder went through her. She said, as though to herself: “Oh, no, no, no! However much I had loved him, I could not touch him then!”

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XXXVI

The door shut softly. Those who had sought privacy in the gray boudoir had retreated discouraged. No more intruders came near as the ball went on. Pale faces had become burning crimson, flushed faces had darkened to purple. A fog of powder, shaken from the faces and bosoms of women, hung in the scorching, suffocating atmosphere, and made haloes round the wax-lights dwindling in gilt wall-sconces and chandeliers. Yawning servants renewed the candles as they were burned out. Not one remembered those in the gray boudoir. And while they flickered low in their silver branches, Henriette said to Dunoisse:

“Do you know the fortress of Ham?”

She continued before he could answer:

“Picture it as a hollow square of granite, set in the middle of a vast, treeless, marshy plain. It has a huge round tower at two of its angles, a powder-magazine at each of the others. A sluggish canal crawls beneath the south and east ramparts, a river winds across the marshy plain, passing beneath the walls of the town. There is only one gateway, guarded by a square tower,--you enter, and are in a great courtyard surrounded by lofty walls, commanded by heavy masses of masonry, with water oozing from the blocks of stone that sparkle with crystals of salt-peter.... One building has grated windows--by that you know it is a prison. Another is the Barracks--a third is the dwelling of the Commandant.”

She said, with a strange wild laugh, and a look of darkling remembrance:

“I spent my honeymoon there, as a bride of seventeen, eight years ago. You have noticed that I am very pale, have you not? It is because all my roses faded and died in that chill cavern of dripping stone. My schoolfellows at the Convent, who used to joke about ‘Henriette’s red cheeks,’ would not have known me. Indeed, I seemed a stranger to myself.... The Tragedy of Existence had been revealed to me. I found it overwhelming.... Perhaps I find it so still, but I have mastered the art of hiding what I feel.”

She was playing a scene as the Henriettes alone know how to play it. This atmosphere, vibrating with allusions, hints, references to hidden griefs, quenched hopes and inward anguish, was the natural element in which she breathed. From the quiver of her lips to the heave of her beautiful bosom, every effect was thought out and calculated; no inflection of her voice but was intended to make its effect, as by an artist of the stage. And she went on:

“When a young wife lives by the side of a husband who is not young or amiable, or even kind--in a place such as I have described, something she must love if she is not to die.... Thus Henriette learned to worship a Cause, and to devote herself, heart and soul, to an object. That was the Restoration of the Empire. She lives for it to-day!...”

Her eyes were like green jewels burning under the shadow of her dusky hair-waves. Her voice thrilled and rang and sighed. “Oh, how I thanked you for those words I heard to-night! What man except yourself would have spoken them! Yes--women can be chivalrous!--women can live and die for a conviction! My terrible confession is made easier by your belief!”

She paused and resumed:

“I aided the escape of the Prince Imperial.... I conceived the idea, thought of the disguise--provided the lay-figure that, dressed in Prince Louis Napoleon’s clothes, lay upon the bed in his prison-cell, while M. Conneau kept guard over the supposed sick man. And I gloried in the success of the enterprise, and every louis I could obtain has since been spent in furthering the Imperial cause. Ah, Heaven! how poor its only hope has been!--he who should wield a scepter, he who should have dipped his hands at will in a treasury of milliards! How poor he still is, it pierces the heart to know. Yet how many have exhausted their resources in supplying that need of his: General Montguichet and M. de Combeville have been reduced to penury, Princess Mathilde and the Comtesse de Thierry-Robec are impoverished by their gifts! Noble, self-sacrificing women!--without envying I have emulated them.... You see these rubies that I wear? Who would guess the stones were false?”

She lifted into the light a radiant forehead. Had you been there to see and hear, you would have said with Dunoisse, “This is the voice--that is the face of Truth!”

And yet, if those rubies had been carried to some expert, obliging dealer in such gewgaws, say Bapst-Odier, late Jeweler to his Majesty, 111 Quai de l’Ecole,--they would--after that stately personage had screwed a microscope into his eye and submitted them to a brief but searching examination--have fetched a really handsome sum.

* * * * *

A fib, then?... Ah! but while Henriette told it she believed it. The tale had seemed to need that one artistic touch of the false jewels heaving on the loyal bosom of the fair Imperialist. And your successful, irresistible deceiver is that he, or she, who, for the time being, succeeds in humbugging and duping and bamboozling Self.

* * * * *

Thus, when Dunoisse, gripped by a sudden spasm of anger and contempt and disgust, muttered:

“And he stoops to take alms--to subsist on funds so gathered! Why not rather sweep the streets?” she continued, in a voice that thrilled with genuine emotion:

“The Arabs tells you that rubies are drops of the hearts’ blood of lovers, shed countless ages ago, and crystallized into jewels by the alchemy of Time. Well, I would empty my veins to-day for the Empire, if need should arise!”

He looked at her and knew that she would do it. With what a spotless flame she seemed to burn. Sweet, heroic zealot!--adored enthusiast! What man, thought Dunoisse, could hesitate to pour his own life out upon the trampled sand of a political arena if by the sacrifice that white bosom might be spared the horrid wound!

“Judge, then, Monsieur, when it seemed, after long years, that the hour of Restoration might be approaching,--when the throne began to totter under the paralyzing weight of the Monarchy,--when I saw France, languishing for a new breath to animate, new blood to revivify her, stretch her weak hands towards the quacks and charlatans who crowd round her sick-bed,--judge if I did not thrill and pant and tremble for that absent one,--if I did not urge all those who recognize in Prince Louis Napoleon France’s rescuer and savior, to exhaust themselves in a supreme effort to bring him to her side. And knowing him in urgent need, deceived by English guile, betrayed by the specious promises of that powerful Minister who has only feigned to befriend him--I borrowed money.... Yes, it must be told....”

She stretched out the little hand and touched the gold lace upon Dunoisse’s sleeve, saying with a wistful smile:

“Borrowing degrades--even when one borrows from a woman. You see, I do not spare myself.... I borrowed from a man.”

Dunoisse’s small square white teeth were viciously set upon his lower lip. His black brows were knitted. His eyes were bent upon the carpet. He heard her say:

“A man who loved me.... Ah! what a coward I am, and how you must despise me! Who loves me, I should say!”

And the sentence was a knife in the heart of the poor dupe who heard. Words were wrenched from him with the sudden pain. He cried, before he could check himself:

“Who is the man?”

And then, meeting her look that conveyed: “You have no right to ask” ... he said with humility: “Forgive me! I was presumptuous and mad to ask that question. Forget that I ever did!”

She gauged him with a keen bright glance, and said with a noble, melancholy simplicity that was as pinchbeck as her abasement of the moment previous:

“You are very young, or you would never have committed so great an error. For if I loved him, I should never tell you for his sake, and if I loved you----”

She registered his start, and finished:

--“I should never tell you for yours. But as I have no love left to give to any man: as the fountains of my heart have long been frozen at their source--I will say this.... You and he were friends once, long years ago, before he became an Under-Secretary at the Foreign Ministry. A cloud has shadowed your old friendship.... A misunderstanding has thrust you apart. You know who it is I mean.”

* * * * *

A cloud had almost palpably come before Dunoisse’s eyes. Their black-diamond brilliancy was dulled to opaqueness, as he looked at Madame de Roux, and his lips, under the small black mustache, made a pale, straight line against his burnt-sienna skin. And from them came a grating voice that said:

“You are speaking of M. Alain de Moulny. I saw you together in the courtyard of the Hotel of Foreign Affairs a moment before the pistol-shot. And he----”

She stretched out, with a gesture of entreaty, her little hands, sparkling with the jewels that were such marvelous imitations, and yet would have fetched a good round sum at Bapst Odier’s.

“Wait--wait! Do not confuse me. Let me tell you in my roundabout woman’s way! He----”

She drew her brows together; moved the toe of her little gray satin slipper backwards and forwards through the silky fur of the chinchilla rug. How little of actual fact may be held to constitute the entire truth, is a problem which confronts the Henriettes at every turn of the road.

“We had had an appointment to meet in my box at the Odéon Theater that evening. M. de Moulny was to have brought me the money there. The disturbances rendered it impossible that he could keep the appointment--the Ministry was guarded by troops--M. Guizot uncertain whether the King would support or abandon him--dispatches and messengers coming every moment, messages and dispatches every instant going out.... So I was to meet M. de Moulny in one of the more private waiting-rooms opening from the Hotel vestibule and receive the money from his hands. He is not rich--what younger son is wealthy? But where there is devotion--what cannot be achieved? He would do anything for me!”

She said, meeting Hector’s somber glance:

“I have heard it said that you are indifferent to women. If so, you are lucky. We bring nothing but misery--even to those we love!”

She swept her little hands upwards through the mass of curls upon her temples, with her favorite gesture:

“I was leaving the Hotel--where my husband was dining with M. Guizot--when the great crowd of people, led by the drum and the Red Flag, filled the Boulevard, and seemed as though about to charge the soldiers, who were drawn up along the railings motionless as statues, with their muskets at the present.... Upon a gray Arab, in command of the half-battalion was a young officer who interested me much....”

Invisible, red-hot needles pricked the listener all over. Then something icy cold seemed to trickle down his spine and escape through the heels of his spurred military boots. The speaker did not look in his direction. Her downcast eyelids fluttered, a faint mysterious smile hovered upon the eloquent mouth.

“He sat his horse like a young Bedouin of the Desert, or such a warrior of ancient Greece as one has seen sculptured on the walls of the Parthenon at Athens. His skin was the ground-color of an Etruscan vase.... Cold though I am--ah! you cannot dream how cold I am!--I have never been insensible to the beauty that is male.”

Under the covert of her eyelashes she stole a glance at the victim.

* * * * *

“I guessed who you were, of course!--you had been minutely described to me.... But it pleased me to pretend ignorance. I said, pointing you out to M. de Moulny: ‘That must be the officer who has newly joined us from Africa. His type is rare--at least in my experience. It is a reincarnation of the Young Hannibal. He has the rich coloring, the bold features, the slender shape.... De Roux must present him. He will bring me purple stuffs and golden ingots and the latest news from Tyre.’ And de Moulny answered, looking at you coldly: ‘He has millions of ingots, but he cannot give you them--unless he cares to break a vow.’ I said: ‘So, then, you know my handsome Carthaginian?’ He answered: ‘I used to, when we were boys at a military institute. It was he who induced me to give up my intention of entering the Army.’ I asked: ‘How, then, Monsieur?... Are you so easily persuaded? What means did your friend employ to alter your determination?’ And de Moulny answered, looking at me oddly: ‘A false step, and a broken foil!’”

The spider-web of fascination she had woven about Dunoisse was weakened, perhaps, by the mention of de Moulny’s name. He looked at Henriette with eyes that had become harder and brighter. He waited for the rest.

“Naturally, so strange an utterance roused my curiosity. I wanted to hear the story, if there is one? But M. de Moulny stuck out his underlip--perhaps you remember a trick he has;--and I thought: ‘Some day you shall tell me the rest.’ We talked of other things--standing there under the portico. Of ourselves, France, the political crisis that loaded the air with the stifling smell of garlic, of old clothes, of unwashed human beings--that filled it with those cries of, ‘Down with the Ministry! Long live Reform! Give us no more thieves in velvet!’ and drowned them in the bellowed strophes of ‘The Marseillaise.’ And as the crowd surged and roared and the Red Flag waved like a bloody rag in the light of their torches, I asked of M. de Moulny--I cannot tell you why I asked it.... Perhaps one is fated to say these things....”

Real emotion was beginning to mingle with feigned feeling. She lifted the chain of rubies that encircled her round white throat as though its light weight oppressed, and tiny points of moisture glittered on her temples and about her lips. She said, touching the lips with a filmy handkerchief edged with heavy Spanish lace:

“I asked of Alain, as the great crowd seemed about to rush upon the gates of the Hotel: ‘What would be, at this juncture, the greatest misfortune that could befall the House of Bourbon?’ He answered: ‘That your young Hannibal should give the word to fire!’”

She imposed silence upon Dunoisse, who was about to break into impetuous speech, by laying a little velvet hand upon his lips, as she had once laid them upon de Moulny’s. She kept the hand there as she said:

“Do not interrupt--it takes all my courage to tell this! I carry a loaded pistol upon all occasions--it is a habit I learned in Spain--in Algeria I found it of use. And I drew the weapon from its hiding-place,--I can hear my own voice saying as I did so: ‘One shot might hasten the crisis.--What if I fired?’... And M. de Moulny said: ‘No, no! You must not!’ And I did! I pulled the trigger, and before the echo of the shot had died, and the salt blue smoke cleared from before my face.”

* * * * *

She was at his feet, weeping, clinging to the shaking hands with which Dunoisse strove to raise her, choking with sobs, burying her face upon his arm, wetting the blue cloth with real tears, entangling silken shining strands of night-dark hair in the rough gold embroidery of the Staff brassard on the Assistant-Adjutant’s sleeve.

“This is my place! Let all the world come and find me here! I do not care! What is humiliation if I can atone? Make no allowances or excuses for me.... Do not say: ‘It was a moment of madness!’ Think of me as your enemy and your destroyer! Ah! what a heart I must have to have smiled in your eyes, as I did when we met this evening, and not have cried out at the first look: ‘Pardon! Forgiveness!--you whom I have wronged!’”

She drew some sobbing breaths, and said, lifting beautiful tear-drenched eyes like pansies in a thunder-shower:

“Hate me for the cold, calculating selfishness--bred of the base desire to save myself from the taint of all that blood--the cowardly fear of the possible vengeance of Red Republicans--that led me to say to you: ‘Take the advice of a sister. Say that you were guilty of this crime!’ For it is a crime. It has defiled my soul with stains that cannot be wiped away.”

The supple red hands of Dunoisse tightened upon the little hands they clasped. He said, looking in her eyes:

“The pistol-shot was yours. But he cried, ‘Fire!’”

She moved her lips soundlessly and nodded.

“I recognized his voice.... I should recognize it through the noise of battle--above all the tumult of the Judgment Day. It claimed payment for the false step--indemnity for the broken foil. Well, let him have both, and find his joy in them!”

He laughed harshly, and his grip was merciless. Yet she bore the pain of it without crying out. His eyes had quitted her face--they were fixed upon the portrait of the nun-Princess of Orleans. And as though some subtle, evil influence had passed from those proud voluptuous painted eyes into his blood, he was conscious of the shaping of a purpose within him and the surging of a flood that was to carry all before it and undo the work of years.

“But one joy he shall not have....”

He hardly knew whether his own lips or another’s had uttered the words. But he looked down and saw Henriette at his feet, between his hands. And as his eyes fell upon the creamy treasure of the fair bosom that heaved so near, Monsieur the Marshal, had he been enabled to look into the gray boudoir at that particular moment, would no longer have been able to say to Hector:

“You are an iceberg. You have Carmel in your blood!”

For the son of Marie Bathilde--carried away by a tidal wave of passion, such as had swept Sister Thérèse de St. François out from among the pallets of the Lesser Ward of the Mercy-House at Widinitz, out of her nun’s cell into the wild, turbulent ocean that rolled and billowed outside the convent walls--was to yield, and take, and eat as greedily as any other son of Adam of the fruit of the Forbidden Tree.

How it matures, the first bite into the sweet, juicy pulp! He had seemed to Henriette a brilliant boy; obstinate and stiff-necked, scrupulous and absurd. Now she saw him transformed to a new being. Vigorous, alert, decisive, masterful, a man to be reckoned with, to be feared while you deceived. And on the boiling whirlpool of passion her own light fragile craft began to dance, and rock, and spin in ever-narrowing circles, as he said, with a strange smile that showed the white teeth gleaming under the small black mustache, but set no gay light dancing in the brilliant, cold black eyes:

“Have no fear. Try to believe me when I promise you, upon my word of honor, that no harm shall come to you from--this that you have done.”

He stooped and kissed the little white hands, and said to their owner:

“Blood on these exquisite hands would be a horror. Well! from henceforth I take their stains on mine.”

She faltered in real agitation:

“What are you going to do?”

The lovely lips were very near his own, as he said, still smiling in that curious way:

“I shall take the advice--not of a sister!”

She panted, shuddering closer.

“No, no! You must not----”

His eyes were fastened on her lips. Instinctively his own were drawn to them. His hot kiss would have burned them in another moment, but that a chill breath seemed to flutter at his ear, and in a flash, he saw the thing he was about to do in its true, ugly colors, and shame stung through and through him, and he drew back.

He had gathered of the fruit of Pleasure and plucked its gaudy flowers in the parterres where these things can be had at a price. He had emptied the frothy cup of Passion and paid its exorbitant bill. But though he may have coveted the mistress of another man, he had never yet desired his neighbor’s wife.

De Roux might be a reprobate and a libertine, but he was Henriette’s husband. And she was not the pure, unattainable planet, the chaste, immaculate divinity he had imagined her; but yet she was a wife. She felt the change in him--saw the fierce, eager light die out in his black eyes, and rose up, saying hurriedly:

“How good you are!--how good! I shall rely upon your promise. We must join the others now. It will not do to be missed!”

So they went out together and mingled with the spinning rout of dancers, as the neglected wax-lights burned out in their silver branches, and the waning moon peeped through the curtains of the gray boudoir. One pale ray touched the portrait of the witch-Princess of Orleans, grasping the Crucifix in the dimpled hand that had never scrupled to pluck Sin’s reddest flowers--treading crowns and scepters under the dainty, naked feet so many lovers had kissed as gayly they danced downwards along the hellward path. And surely the proud, sensuous eyes leered with wicked triumph, and could it be that the smile upon the painted mouth had given place to laughter?

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XXXVII

The General Court-Martial of Inquiry into the conduct of the junior Staff-officer left in command of the half-battalion of infantry detailed to guard the Ministry of Foreign Affairs upon a day to be marked with red upon the calendar, was held at the Barracks of the 999th in the Rue de l’Assyrie, between the official hours of Eight in the morning and Four in the afternoon.

One may suppose the pomp and solemnity of the affair, the portals guarded by sentries, Monsieur the Judge-Advocate and his subordinates in official robes, Monsieur the President and other stately cock-hated, plumed, bewigged personages of the General Staff, with the various officers convened as witnesses, solemnly filing in behind the Provost-Marshal and his guard--taking their seats, right and left according to rank, at the =T=-shaped arrangement of tables, covered with the significant Green Cloth; everyone arrayed in full Review-uniform, making the whitewashed mess-hall brilliant as a garden of flaunting summer flowers.

They took the votes according to the time-honored custom, beginning with the youngest person present. The Provost-Marshal and his merry men brought the Prisoner in.

Dunoisse, without sword or sash, went calmly to the place of dread at the bottom of the leg of the =T= of tables. Reporters for the Press were accommodated with a bench behind a board on trestles under the high window at the bottom of the hall. The Orders and Warrants were read, with clearing of throats and official hawking. And at each pause, from a balcony high up upon the plain bare wall behind the President’s table, came the silken frou-frou of ladies’ dresses and the rustling of ribbons and bonnet-plumes. And one heart among all those that throbbed there, under its covering of silken velvet and sable-fur, was sick with hidden apprehension and cold with secret dread.

There was no challenge on the part of the accused officer when the President-General asked the question: “Do you object to be tried by me or any of these officers whose names you have heard?” He bowed and replied, “No!”.... He had no suspicion of prejudice or malice lurking under any uniform present. And then, erect, in a rigid attitude of respect and attentive deference, the Prisoner listened to the reading of the Charge.

This occupied time, the process of Courts-Martial very successfully emulating the pompous prolixity of tribunals of the Civil kind. And while the python-periods dragged their tortuous length from sheet to sheet of official paper, Dunoisse found himself mentally traveling back to those early days at the Royal School of Technical Military Instruction, when de Moulny was Redskin’s hero and faithful Achates, Mentor and Admirable Crichton all rolled into one. And butt on occasions, it is to be added. For sometimes it is sweet to laugh at one you most sincerely love.

Thinking thus, he began to realize how in his loneliness he had clung to the memory of the old affection. How always,--always he had been hoping that the barriers of estrangement and silence might be broken down one day. That Alain might yet come to him with outstretched, eager hand, saying:

“I have withheld my friendship all these years, that I might be able to give you my esteem and my admiration. You have been tried by me as no friend was ever yet tried, tested to the utmost, and proved as none has ever been proved before you.... Was it not worth while to bear something to earn such praise from me?”

And now Dunoisse saw the god of his old boyish, innocent idolatry stripped of the false jewels and tawdry robes that had adorned him, his nimbus of gilt plaster knocked away. He began to understand how he, Hector Dunoisse, had been his whole life long the slave, and tool, and puppet, and victim of this cold, arrogant, dominating nature; and resentment glowed in him, scorching up the last green blade of lingering kindness; and hatred leaped up in a little flickering tongue of greenish flame, soon to become a raging prairie-fire of vengeance, traveling with the speed of the wind that urged it on.

He clenched his hands and set his teeth, remembering his long arrears of injuries. He saw himself economizing uniforms, doing without necessaries and comforts, slaving in spare hours to earn the money to buy books and instruments--bound and fettered always by that egregious vow.... Then a conviction started through him like the discharge from an electric battery. Malice was the missing key-word of the cipher that had been so difficult to read.

Revenge for the spoiled career had prompted everything. No pleasure foregone, luxury denied, but had paid off some item of the old score that had been carved with the end of the broken fencing-foil. That the false step had been deliberately planned, de Moulny must have always believed. He had told the story everywhere. And the taint of that supposed treachery had always clung about Dunoisse’s footsteps. It had followed him through life.

Now he lifted up those glittering black eyes of his to the balcony where bonnet-plumes were nodding as their wearers whispered of him.... And he met the eyes of Henriette de Roux.

Those beautiful eyes!... Their owner had seemed to him upon that first night of their meeting a star and a goddess--something to dream of and worship from a long way off.

But before gray dawn had peeped in between the window-curtains upon the whirling crowd of weary, hot-eyed dancers, he had learned to know her better. The star was no celestial sphere, but an earthly planet, glowing with fierce volcanic fires; the dazzling robe of the divinity, now that she had descended from her pedestal, was seen to be stained with frailties of the human kind. But brought within reach, she was not less desirable. He thrilled at the recollection of that night in the gray boudoir.

Ah! those sweet lips that mingled Truth and Falsehood in such maddening philters! Ah! those bewitching eyes, how they promised, and coaxed, and cajoled! A shudder went through the man. For he saw again, more clearly by their light, the pleasant pathway that went winding downwards between banks of gorgeous, poison-breathing flowers. And a soft, insinuating voice seemed whispering, prompting; telling him that with a tithe of the great sum of money that had lain growing for so many years at Rothschild’s, could be purchased the sweet, heady vengeance that is wreaked in the satisfaction of desire.

And then ... he became aware that the labyrinthine verbosities of the Charge had reached a final period, and that Monsieur the Judge-Advocate had a question to ask.

“Are you, Lieutenant Hector-Marie-Aymon von Widinitz-Dunoisse, Certificated of the General Staff, and Attached as Assistant-Adjutant to the 999th Regiment of the Line, Guilty or Not Guilty of the Charge brought against you, and which I have now read in the hearing of this Court?”

The reply left little excuse for prolonged investigations. The arraigned officer simply said:

“Monsieur, I gave the order to fire. I believed it necessary. I have no excuse to offer--no plea to make. I submit myself absolutely to the jurisdiction of the Court.”

Which Court, at the end of this First Assembly, declined to continue the proceedings, the prisoner having acted with a certain degree of rashness, yet with the very best intentions, in the face of an emergency of the gravest kind. And, furthermore, having been severely reprimanded in orders by his Colonel; and placed in and kept under close arrest by the said commander, the said Court did ultimately find Further Proceedings under the circumstances would be Unjustifiable, and recommended that the said Prisoner be immediately Released, the charge against him Not Having Been Proved.

And the grave farce was ended--the solemn jest played out, amidst the rustling of draperies, and the nodding of bonnet-plumes, and the clapping of little kid-covered hands up in the gallery where the Band played on guest-nights, and where at least one heart beat with infinite relief.

Amidst a universal rising, saluting, putting on of plumed cocked hats and white gloves, after official congratulations and some bowings and hand-shakings, the Assistant-Adjutant, plus his sash and sword, was free to go about his business, without that haunting sense of being a marked man, under ban of the Second Republic of France. And Dunoisse put on his shako and went out into the sanded barrack-yard, walking with the step of the free. And an orderly of the Colonel’s presently brought him a little lilac note, addressed in violet ink, in the small, clear character, exhaling a perfume that had haunted him, of late, persistently. And the little lilac note said:

“Come!”

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XXXVIII

Perhaps you know how Henriette received him? She took his hands and looked long and softly in the clear-cut, vivid face, and said, while great tears brimmed her white underlids and fell softly down her cheeks:

“Oh, you are noble! Why have I not known you before? Why must we only meet as late as this?”

And presently:

“What other man would be capable of such generosity? And you ask nothing--you who might demand so much!”

De Roux was absent on official business. Dunoisse remained some hours, went away, and returned to dinner. Madame de Roux had a box at the Italiens for that evening. It was perfectly proper that the sub-Adjutant of the 999th should escort his Colonel’s wife.

* * * * *

The opera was “Semiramide.” Carnavale was in the stalls, wearing the crimson dress-coat dedicated to that special opera. On nights when “Der Freischütz” was given he appeared in apricot,--when “Lucia” was performed you saw him in pale blue. Giulia Gigi sang,--upon that night of all the nights the glorious artist reached the apex of her triumph. The great pure voice flowed forth, the soul was caught upon and carried away by wave upon wave of wonderful music; the Opera-House was filled with them; the atmosphere, saturated with mille-fleurs and frangipani, was electrical with human passion. Dunoisse looked, not at the beautiful singer, who trod the stage and sang as one inspired, but at Henriette.... Her head was thrown back, her transparent eyelids were closed, her delicate nostrils quivered, her throat throbbed and swelled. The curve of it suggested the swan dying in melody. For Dunoisse the music was she. She sat forwards upon her chair of velvet, and the diamond cross upon her bosom wakened into vibrant light and sank into soft suggestive shadow as she drew and exhaled deep, sighing breaths. Below the line of her short glove a blue vein leaped in her delicate wrist. To see it was to long to kiss it. Dunoisse’s eyes could not keep away.

And Gigi sang more and more divinely, and at the end of her greatest scena, sweeping off the stage like a human tornado, you might, had you been sitting in the shadow of velvet curtains, in a certain box upon the Grand Tier, occupied by two people who hardly looked at the stage, have seen her seize from the grasp of a giant fireman in a shining helmet, tight shell-jacket with enormous shoulder-straps and cavalry trousers, a glittering pewter--pour down that statuesque throat of hers a copious draught of English porter, frothing, mellow, and mild; kick out her imperial train with one backward movement of a foot too solid for a fairy’s, and storm back again amidst the thundering cries of “Bis!” and “Brava!” to grant the demanded encore.

Who grudges the Gigi her porter? I have seen the nightingale, that unrivaled soloist, at the finish of a marvelous series of runs and trills, a fine frenzy of jug-jug-jugging, look about him, preen his snuff-colored breast-feathers, and presently hop down to a lower branch and help himself to a snack. Why, then, should we chide the prima-donna for her draught of stout, or cavil at the grilled lobsters, risotto, or macaroni dressed with chillies and tomatoes, that her soul loves? For are not these, by the alchemy of digestion, equally with the earwig, woodlouse, or grub of the other singer, transmuted into heavenly sounds?

Henriette said to Dunoisse, as the great waves of melody broke over them:

“You said that night in the boudoir that you would not take advice from me as a sister. But I am your sister!--nothing but your sister! Let us make a compact upon that?”

Dunoisse agreed, without enthusiasm. She thanked him in a velvety whisper. Presently she said:

“If all men were as noble as you, this world would be a happy place for women. How wonderful to have met a nature such as yours! Another man would have kissed me--that night when I made my terrible confession. But I knew that I was secure,--I rested upon your honor. Let it be always thus between us. Let me always feel when I am with you that I am a soul without a body--a pure spirit floating in clear ether with my friend.”

Dunoisse gave the promise with obvious reluctance. Then they talked about the music energetically. But presently, when the great gilded chandelier soared up into the artificial firmament of the domed ceiling, and the stage-lights were lowered, and the flats parted--revealing the Tomb of Ninus, by the pale mysterious rays of the calcium moon--a cheek that was warm and satiny, and glowing as a nectarine plucked from a south wall in the ripening heats of July, brushed Dunoisse’s--and his trumpery promise broke its gilded string, and flew away upon the wind of a double sigh.

De Roux looked in to escort his wife home, at the conclusion of the opera. He had been winning at cards,--was smiling and urbane, and Dunoisse, looking at the dyed, red-faced, dissipated, elderly dandy, knew the sickness of loathing. De Roux had shown him civility, courtesy, even friendliness, yet he hated him with zeal and rancor. He watched the Colonel as he wrapped his beautiful wife in her ermine mantle--the same that she had worn, Dunoisse remembered, upon the evening of the bloodshed at the Hotel of Foreign Affairs. And as the almond-nailed, plump fingers of one of the Colonel’s well-kept, ringed hands touched Henriette’s bare shoulder, she winced and shuddered. Her mouth contracted as though to stifle a cry--her long eyes shot a glance at her friend that seemed a mute appeal to be saved from the indignity of that touch.... And so fierce was the jealous impulse urging Dunoisse to dash his clenched fist into the gross, sensual face of her possessor, that he was fain to thrust his tingling right hand deep into his trouser-pocket and clench it there until the glove split.

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XXXIX

The Bonaparte, upon a strong hint received from Citizen Lamartine, did not make a protracted stay in Paris. He returned to the savage scenes of his exile, suffering eclipse behind the curtain of fog enveloping the barbarous island of Great Britain, until an early date in June. But previous to departure, he held a reception of his friends and supporters, followed by a supper, to which only intimate acquaintances were invited, at the Hotel du Rhin in the Place Vendôme. For the earlier function Dunoisse received a card.

The first-floor suite of rooms, occupied by the hope of the Imperialist Party, boasted a certain pompous splendor. There were gilded wall-decorations, velvet hangings, ormolu and marble consoles, clocks and mirrors topped with perching eagles, carpets patterned with garlands, masks, fillets and torches, high-backed settees with scrolled ends; chairs of classical simplicity, tripod-pedestals bearing vases, all the worm-eaten and moth-riddled lumber of the defunct Empire, routed out of basements, dragged down from garrets by a time-serving management eager to gratify their princely tenant’s hereditary tastes.

He thought all this rococo pseudo-classicism supremely hideous, for his predilections were for the gaudy, the showy, the voluptuous, and the bizarre, yet he gazed pensively upon these relics of an extinct era. His bedroom had a vast purple four-poster with a canopy like a catafalque, and a dressing-table, white lace over violet silk, suggestive of an altar in mid-Lent, that gave him the horrors. And it was all as expensive as it was ugly, and every hour added to the length of the management’s Python-bill. Fortunate that funds supplied him by an anonymous adherent had plumped the cheeks of his emptying purse, otherwise Paris might have been treated to a spectacle that London had witnessed before then--the pantomimic interlude of the Prince Pretender, who, lacking the needful cash to defray mine host’s charges, had, minus his hatboxes and tin cases and hair-trunks, with grievous lack of ceremony, been hustled to the door....

* * * * *

He received his guests of that evening with a bland, dignified politeness, even a certain grace, despite his awkward build, stunted proportions, and heavy, sleepy air.

Badly dressed, in an egregious chocolate-colored evening coat with gold buttons, trousers of the same color, wide at the hips, and with strips of black silk braiding down the outer seams, he yet wore an air of composed assurance, smiling pleasantly under his heavy brown mustache, moving his tufted chin about in the high stock embraced by the cravat of white satin, adorned with emerald pins, flowing into the bosom of a waistcoat of green plush. Despite the star upon the chocolate-colored coat; and the crimson watered-silk ribbon that supported the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, there was not one of his small band of followers and adherents but looked more fit to play the rôle of Prince than he.

They bore themselves with imperturbable gravity, these needy adventurers, most of them blown by the wind that had seemed to fill the slack sails of their master’s ship of fortune from Albion’s hospitable shores.... They took the stage at this juncture like the characters in a Comedy of Masks.... You had the Pretender, the Confidant, the Councillor, the Panderer, the Doctor, the Valet, and the Bona Roba--the last discreetly kept out of sight. The Bravo was at that time in Africa, to be recalled later on. And they played their several parts, with some stately change of title and trappings on the part of certain of the actors, to the fall of the curtain upon the Last Act.

You saw the Count Auguste de Morny, ex-Member of the Chamber of Commerce,--afterwards to reign as the all-powerful Minister of the Home Department under the Second Empire,--as a sallow, well-bred rake of forty, prematurely bald, erect if hollow-chested, faultlessly dressed in the becoming blue swallow-tailed coat with gold buttons, voluminous starched cambric neckcloth, white vest, full-hipped black velvet pantaloons, and narrow-toed buckled shoes of the latest evening wear. Well-to-do, a familiar figure in Paris during the Monarchy, he held a better reputation than his legitimate brother, the man of straw.

And he walked behind the Prince-Pretender now, through a lane of curtseying ladies and bowing gentlemen, outwardly urbane, inwardly infinitely bored by all that was taking place, yet conscious of its probable result upon the Bourse, and alert for intelligence respecting the rise of certain stocks in which he was secretly a large investor.

* * * * *

His companion, some years his senior, and dressed in uniform fashion, was a personage infinitely more striking than the Count. The pale classic oval of his aquiline-featured face, its high brow streaked with a few silken strands of chestnut, the deep blue eyes lightening from beneath the wide arched brows, the sweet deceptive smile, the round chin with a cleft in it, are indelibly stamped upon the memory of the French people, whatever effigy appears upon the coinage of France. Colonna Walewski, son of the Great Emperor by the Polish Countess who was faithful to Napoleon in exile as in defeat, inherited his mother’s fine quality of loyalty. In foul weather and fair, in disgrace as in triumph, in the heyday of the Second Empire as in its decline and collapse, the Napoleonic Idea remained the religion of Napoleon’s bastard son.

His fellow-bastard, the wit and dandy, the politician and financier, less noble in grain than the brilliant soldier, the keen diplomat and the man of letters,--you will always find upon the winning side.

As for Persigny, the Bonaparte’s parasite and inseparable companion,--who was to succeed de Morny as Minister of the Interior, and subsequently figure as Ambassador and Plenipotentiary at the Court of a neighboring Foreign Power,--he looked like what he was; a dissipated ex-quarter-master-sergeant of cavalry grafted on a rowdy buck-about-town. And Fleury, sensual, hot-headed, lively, bulldog-jowled, bold-eyed and deep-chested, heir of a wealthy tradesman, ruined through women and horses, he no less than Persigny had risen from the bottom sludge....

Elderly bloods, middle-aged dandies like their master, they dressed after him, aped his tone and manner, rouged their dry cheekbones and hollowing temples, set false tufts of curls among their dyed hyacinthine locks. Necessitous and creditor-ridden, even as he, they were sharp-set and keen as ferrets for chances of rapine and plunder. And the day was coming when they were to be glutted with these, and crawl after their leader from the warren, gorged, and leaving on the thirsty sand a wide, dark streak of blood.

* * * * *

“It was terrible crossing in the mail-packet,” said Persigny in answer to the question of a sympathizer. “M. de Fleury and myself suffered abominably--the Prince not at all. There was something the matter with the railway-line. We had to walk to Neufchâtel over the ballast and sleepers in thin boots of patent-leather,--imagine the torture to one’s corns!... But the Prince laughed at our grumblings--only when we missed the Amiens train did he lose his sang-froid and stoicism. And after all, that delay proved to his advantage.... There was an accident to the train we lost--thirty passengers killed,--many more wounded.... The Prince’s lucky star has been once more his friend!”

The parasite’s voice, purposely raised, reached the little ears shadowed by Madame de Roux’s rich black tresses. She murmured as she sank in her deep curtsey, and emerged, radiant and smiling, from a foamy sea of filmy white lace flounces, to meet the gracious handshake that was accorded to special friends:

“It is true, Monseigneur? You have escaped such perils as M. de Persigny describes?”

Said the little gentleman with the sallow face and the dull, lusterless gray eyes, caressing the brown chin-tuft that was later to be dubbed “an imperial,” and worn by all ranks and classes of men:

“I fancy there was something of the kind. I hardly noticed. I realized nothing but that, after all my cruel years of exile, I was on the road to Paris at last!”

* * * * *

He had been horribly seasick during the Channel crossing, and had bestowed heartfelt curses on the broken granite of the railway-line. He had paled and shuddered at the thought of the smash in which he might have been involved. But to come up to the Idea Napoleonic, it was necessary to be heroic. And with so grave a face and with such imperturbable effrontery did Persigny hold the candle, that the person belauded ended by believing all that was said.

Even now, to many of his friends and supporters, the shadow of the purple Imperial mantle gave dignity to the wearer of the chocolate-colored coat, green plush waistcoat, and big-hipped, braided trousers. His own faith in his Mission and his Star lent him the power to convince and to impress.

His was not a star of happy omen for England, who sheltered and befriended him with the kind of good-humored pity that is not unmixed with contempt. Plagued with the gadfly of debt, tormented by the Tantalus-thirst of the born spendthrift who sees gold lavished by other hands, and who has never funds at command to dissipate, what rage and hatred must have seethed under his smooth ingratiating demeanor, when, with one or another of his henchmen at his elbow, he sat down to the lavish table spread by the sumptuous mistress of Gewgaw House, or planned landscape-gardens with the master of Brodrick Castle.

That had been for years his fate, to fawn for bare subsistence upon those he hated. Compelled to this, the son of proud, faithless, extravagant, voluptuous Hortense must have suffered the pains of Hell. Not a hell whence Hope was altogether banished. He had hoped when he made the attempt on Strasburg; had hoped when the body of the Great Emperor was solemnly removed from St. Helena to be magnificently interred in Paris. Still hoping, he had hired a London-and-Margate steamer, a husband’s boat, for himself and his party of sixty adherents; had purchased a second-hand live eagle, trained to alight upon its owner’s shoulder for a gobbet of raw meat; had landed, with this disconsolate bird, at Vimereux, near Boulogne; had hugged the Column, attired in the historic uniform of the 40th of the Line; had ridden with his followers to the town Barracks, where were quartered the 46th; had ordered these warriors, per the mouth of a subaltern of their Regiment, to turn out upon the parade-ground; had bidden them thrill at the sight of the eagle, swear loyalty to the little cocked hat--salute the nephew of their late Emperor, and march with him to Paris.

We are acquainted with the burlesque ending of that enterprise, the pricking of the balloon by the bayonets of National Guards--the pantomimic flattening of the Pretender and his followers beneath the collapsed folds of the emptied bag, has been held up to the popular derision by innumerable caricaturists of the day. We are aware--I quote from an obscure comic publication of the period, long since dead of its own indigestible wit--how the Boulogne Picnic began with Fowl, and ended with Ham.... And yet, though the asserter of Imperial claims was jeered at as a mountebank;--even though that marionette-invasion ludicrously failed, how many grave and weightily-important personages had not the Prince-Pretender infected with his own conviction, that to him, and to him alone, had been entrusted the lofty mission of saving, elevating, ennobling, delivering France....

He murmured now, looking at Henriette between half-closed lids, with eyes that appraised every charm, and took deliberate stock of her whole armory of beauties:

“I had too much to think of, dear friend, to heed the perils of the road. But those who accompanied me, ready to share triumph as they have shared Failure,--it would have touched you to witness their emotion as they realized how nearly Death had quenched their hopes. They do not understand yet at what a price the exile has purchased repatriation. To-night will bring home to them the knowledge of this. Ah! here is M. Hugo, charged with the revelation. I fear it will be a painful one for you!”

“Sire ...” she breathed in distress. He corrected her imperturbably:

“Neither ‘Sire’ or ‘Monseigneur,’ I beg of you! Follow the example of M. Hugo--let me be plain ‘Monsieur.’”

And as though to bear him out, the splendid voice of Hugo uttered resoundingly:

“Monsieur!...”

And beaming with cordial smiles, the great Conservative Republican advanced towards Louis-Napoleon, while some half-dozen other wearers of black coats and tricolored sashes pushed through the press towards the orator, who was later to array himself, with all his forces of eloquence, learning, irony, and enthusiasm, upon the extreme Left.

“Monsieur...” he began, while his Burgraves took up their position right and left of their Barbarossa, and the short gentleman in the green plush waistcoat stood still, with the little jeweled hand of Madame de Roux resting on his chocolate-colored sleeve: “Monsieur, when a few days back in the new Constituent Assembly of the Second French Republic the question was raised: ‘Shall the nephew of the Emperor Napoleon be readmitted into France?’ I and my comrades, having confidence in your pledges, voted in your favor. We extend to you now our welcome upon your return, not as the Pretender to the Imperial Throne, but as Bonaparte the good citizen; who seeks, not to rule men, but to represent them; not to be deified, but to serve. And in the name of Liberty and Peace and Freedom--I offer you my hand!”

The hand went out with its large sweeping gesture. The little gentleman stood stock still. His white-kid gloved fingers played with the black ribbon of his eyeglass. He said, with the drawling snuffle that characterized him, and with so subtle a burlesque of the pompous manner of the orator that those who were most stung to indignation by the mockery were unable to repress a smile:

“Monsieur ... the Second Republic of France is now established upon a basis that can never be undermined. As I am not a genius, I entertain no ambition to emulate the career of my glorious uncle,--Integrity and Honor, bareheaded, are preferable to crime that is crowned. Give me, then, the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, the honest citizen.... I prefer that to the title of Napoleon, the Emperor of France!”

He added, addressing himself to Hugo with an air of confidential simplicity that painted a faint grin upon the faces of de Morny and Walewski:

“I am told, M. Hugo, that during the recent reign of the barricades, no milk-and-butter carts could penetrate into Paris, and that her citizens were obliged to be content with chocolate made with water,--dry rolls, and café noir. Well!--let us see to it that not only milk and butter, but wine and honey flow during the New Era, and that the streets shall be repaved with hams and sausages. And in place of the planes and acacias that have been decapitated, let us plant fig-trees, olives and vines.”

He bowed with much grace, considering his disadvantages of figure, and moved onwards, stepping deliberately as Agag, with the little high-arched feet in the wonderfully-polished boots that were no bigger than those of a pretty girl. It stamps him--who was undeniably possessed of a mordant power of irony,--as being devoid of the saving grace of humor, that he should, during the period of his American exile, have conferred upon a throbbing feminine devotee and partisan one of these shiny leather boots of his--which the possessor employed alternately as a receptacle for flowers, or as a repository for embroidery-silks; or merely as an object of peculiar veneration, preserved under a glass-case.

He said in the ear of Madame de Roux, as exclamations, comments, ejaculations, broke out on all sides, in tones of consternation, satisfaction, exasperation, not to be repressed:

“What do you say, dear friend? Is not the ax laid to the root of the Violet with a vengeance? Shall we not cultivate our cabbages henceforth in tranquillity and peace?”

He added, as with an ineffable air of conquering gallantry he handed the beautiful woman to a sofa, and placed himself beside her:

“Tell me that I have kept my promise, given that day when you walked with a poor prisoner on the ramparts of the Fortress of Ham.... ‘If ever I return to France,’ I said, ‘I will hold this little hand upon my arm as I receive the congratulations of my friends.”

“Ah! but, Monsieur,” said Henriette, all pale and quivering, “your words were, ‘When I return to France in triumph!’ and this----”

She broke off. He ended the sentence, saying with a shallow, glittering look:

“And this is not triumph, but humiliation. I understand!” He pulled at the flowing goatee, and added, in his mildest drawl:

“Let me remind you that the ancient Roman triumphs, as represented at the theater, invariably begin with a procession of captives and spoils. Imagine yourself at the Français, seated in a box. And consider that though it hardly befits an Emperor to play the part of a slave, unless at the feet of a lovely woman, yet the slave may be promoted to the part of Leading Citizen. And from the armchair upon the platform behind the tribune, might be wielded, on occasion, the lightnings that slay from a throne.”

Even as he uttered the words, a witty woman of society was saying in the ear of a depressed Imperialist:

“Ah,--bah! Why are you so dismal? This is only another move in the eternal game of the Cæsars. Did Nero scruple to lick the dust in order that he might reign? To me, behind that leaden mask of his, he seemed to be bursting with laughter. Depend upon it, Badinguet is cleverer than any of you believe!”

“Badinguet” or “Beaky”--those were among his nick-names--the pigmy who aspired to the ermined mantle of the tragic giant, and the throne under the crimson velvet canopy powdered with Merovingian bees.

Doubtless, in the eyes of many another besides the brilliant speaker, he seemed as absurd, grotesque, mirth-provoking an object as any Punch-puppet. But later, when Punch was gilded thick with stolen gold, and painted red with human blood, he was to assume another aspect. For Life and Death were in his power. And the world laughed no more.

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XL

He said to Henriette now, stroking his mustache, and giving another of those dull, inscrutable glances:

“No!--the President of the Democratic Republic of France would neither be destitute of the power to strike his enemies or the ability to shower honors and rewards upon his friends.”

She dropped her white, deep-fringed eyelids, and said, almost in a whisper:

“True friendship seeks no honors, and is indifferent to rewards.”

Only that morning he had received a letter from another woman, young, beautiful, and heiress to vast estates. She offered him all her wealth. He was to use it as he would. She made no conditions, stipulated for no repayment. She was perfectly disinterested, just like Henriette.

And on the previous day an elderly person with two wooden legs, who had once been a popular actress in vaudeville, and who kept the newspaper-kiosk in front of Siraudin’s at the angle of the Boulevard des Capucines and the Rue de la Paix, had made a similar proposal.

“Monseigneur,” she had said, as he gave her a small gratuity in passing, “deign to permit a word?” She added, as Monseigneur signified permission: “See you, they tell me you are uncommonly tight for money; do not ask who they are--everybody knows it. And I am not so poor but that I have three billets of a thousand francs laid away as a nest-egg. Say the word, and I will lend you them--you shall pay me back with interest when you are Emperor of France.”

Kate Harvey and the newspaper-seller were more honest than the rest of them....

Kate had said:

“Look here, old pal, here are fifty thousand shiners it took me a heap of trouble to rake together. You shall have ’em to play with, only give me I.O.U.’s for a hundred and forty thou. And a title by-and-by, when you are Emperor,--something to make the proper folks at home twiddle their thumbs and stare.”

That was plain speaking. He understood that kind of bargaining. People who asked nothing wanted most in the long run.

“Undoubtedly,” he now replied to Madame de Roux, “friendship like yours seeks no return of favors. But the heart is relieved of its burden of gratitude in the lavish bestowal of these....” He added: “Not that obligations to you weigh heavily.... Yes, I have eaten the bread of your charity. That sum of twenty thousand francs--sent to me at the commencement of the insurrection--the twenty-five thousand forwarded to me here on the evening of yesterday--anonymously--like other sums that I have received from the same source.... Did you think I should not guess whose hand it was that traced the words, ‘From a Lover of the Violet, who longs to see the flower take root again upon the soil of France’?”

She faltered, careful that the denial should appear hesitating and labored:

“Monseigneur, you mistake.... I wrote nothing.... The money you speak of did not come from me!”

He shook his lank-haired head, and said in a nasal murmur:

“Do not deny it. The sheet of paper upon which the words were traced bore no signature, it is true, but the handwriting could not be mistaken. Or the perfume, that recalled so much when I pressed it to my lips.”

Her beautiful bosom heaved. Her eyes seemed to avoid him.

“My lips, that were more privileged once.... Shall I tell you what words broke from them to-night when they announced you? Ask de Morny, who overheard. He will tell you that I said: ‘Thank Heaven, she is not changed!’”

To be accurate, he had remarked to de Morny that night upon her entrance: “She is still charming!” and de Morny had answered: “And still ambitious, you may depend!”

It suited him that women should be ambitious. All through those years of intrigue and plotting their ambitions were the rungs of the ladder by which he climbed.

She looked at him full, and her beautiful eyes were dewy, and her white bosom rose and fell in sighs that, if not genuine, were excellently rendered. He went on:

“And yet you are changed. You were courageous and high-spirited--you have become heroic. That shot at the Foreign Ministry.... A colossal idea! When I heard of it I applauded the stratagem as masterly. ‘Who of all my friends,’ I wondered, ‘can have been so much a friend?’ Then your little message in Spanish was brought to me in London. I read it and cried out, to the surprise of de Morny and some other men who were sitting with me in the smoking-room of the Carlton Club: ‘Oh, that I had a crown to bestow on her!’ ‘Upon whom?’ they asked, and I answered, before I could check myself, ‘Upon Henriette!’”

She breathed quickly as the instilled poison worked in her. The fiery light of ambition was in her glance. He saw it, and noted that her dress of filmy Alençon lace and the style of her jeweled hair-ornaments were copied, as closely as the prevailing fashion would admit, from a well-known portrait of the Empress Josephine.... It tickled his mordant sense of humor excessively that a lovely woman should endeavor to subjugate him by resembling his aunt deceased. But no vestige of his amusement showed in his sallow face as he went on:

“But magnificent as was the service you rendered, I am glad that you have escaped the pillory of publicity, and the possible vengeance of the Reds. By the way, that young officer who proclaimed before the Military Tribunal, ‘It was I who gave the order to fire! Do with me what you will!’ is here to-night. I told them to send him an invitation. His father was a valued General upon the Staff of my glorious uncle. I desired that he should be presented to me on that account. Pray point him out.”

Then, as the lace-and-tortoiseshell fan wielded by Henriette’s little dimpled hand, loaded with gems which surely were not paste imitations, indicated a young and handsome man in infantry uniform, who from the shelter of a doorway was gazing at her with all his eyes and his heart in them, the drawling nasal voice said:

“He loves you!... It is written in his face.... And I can even wish that he may be happy.... Have I not my share of heroism too?”

“Monseigneur,” said Henriette, with an air of simple candid dignity, “in that young man you see a devoted friend who is ready to give all, and to demand nothing in return.”

She had quite forgotten the kiss in the box at the Opera, and a good deal more besides. But when the Henriettes prefer not to remember an episode, it is as though it had never occurred. She continued in her soft, thrilling tones:

“Nothing save absolute trust: confidence such as he gives me. A few nights past he told me his entire history: I could not refrain from tears. He is young, as your Highness sees; handsome, as you have observed; heir-presumptive to the throne of a Bavarian feudal Principality and owner of a vast fortune. Well, the throne he is too scrupulous to claim, because of a fault in the line of succession; the fortune he has refused to accept because it was gained by what he holds to be an unjust claim. But if I lifted up my finger ... like that, Monseigneur....”

She laughed as she held the slender finger up, and challenge and meaning and promise were in her face, and the witchery of it, no less than that hint of gold piled up and hoarded, made even the Pretender’s dull blood tingle in his veins. He said, with brightening eyes and a tinge of color in his sallow cheeks:

“It might yet be worth your while to lift your finger up, Madame, although I have as yet no crown to share with the woman who shall bear my name.”

It was a name, at that psychological moment, that was not worth sixpence among the British bill-discounters, and at sight of which upon paper the sons of Levi and Manasseh morally rent their garments and threw figurative dust upon their heads. But it had a specious value, dangled as a bait before ambitious women; and here, he knew, was one....

To sway the mass of men you must have Money to give them. True, de Morny, Persigny and Co. could be pacified with orders for millions upon an Imperial Treasury that was non-existent as yet. But the rank-and-file of his filibusters and mercenaries must be paid in hard cash, and women always knew where to go for the shekels. Either they had independent fortunes, or their families were wealthy, or their lovers were rich and generous. Skillfully handled, stimulated by artful hints of marvelous rewards and compensations, Eve’s daughters, his confederates and creditors, had never failed to serve him at his need.

That indomitable partisan and tireless intriguer, his cousin the Princess Mathilde, had poured her whole fortune into his bottomless pockets. Now, when his want was greater than ever, Mathilde was without a sou. Lord Walmerston’s last subsidy of three thousand pounds, a sum of humiliating smallness, grudgingly accorded, was dwindling rapidly. And money for the expenses of the campaign of June must be forthcoming, and at once.

The attempt on Boulogne had failed, because the tin cases of gold coins slung round the necks of the adventurers for distribution had held so little, and been emptied so quickly.... Money must not be lacking for the printing of millions of handbills and posters; for the payment of hundreds of electioneering agents, touts, and canvassers; for the bribery of thousands of electors who could not be coaxed into giving their suffrage--heaps of money would be required now.

Money! If one would be elected as Representative for the Department of the Seine, and the three other Departments that were to prove so many steps to the armchair upon the platform behind the tribune of the Assembly--money, money! If one would by bribery and corruption raise that same armchair to the height of an Imperial throne--money, money, money! Golden mortar, without which the house that Jack builds must topple at the first puff of wind, and resolve itself into a mere heap of jumbled brickbats. Money, money, money, money! And the little Corporal, at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, had scarcely been poorer than his nephew was to-day.

The uncle was not over-scrupulous, less so the nephew. His end of self-glorification justified every shameful means.

For him the harlot emptied her stocking, the wealthy saloon-keeper and ex-procuress poured out her tainted gold. To be mistress-in-chief to an Emperor, to flaunt a title in the face of prim Respectability, that was what Kate Harvey sought, and had, when his sun had risen. But the other women, lured on to bankruptcy and ruin by his dull magnetic glance and skillfully-cast bait of promises, saw hovering before their dazzled eyes--receding ever farther into the sandy desert of Unattainability--the bridal carriage of gold lacquer and mother o’ pearl, surmounted by the Imperial Eagle. The carved and gilded Matrimonial Chair upon the crimson bee-spangled daïs and the Crown of Josephine....

* * * * *

So, with the flutter of a fan in a jeweled hand, a few brief sentences interchanged, the glance of a pair of brilliant eyes and the dull, questioning look of a pair of fishy ones, at the dark, vivid face and lithe, erect figure standing in the doorway, Dunoisse was bought and sold.

If he had only known, when a little later he was presented to the Prince by Colonel de Roux.... But there was no expression in the vacuous eyes that blinked at him, hardly a shade of meaning in the flat toneless voice that said:

“I am happy in the knowledge, Bonsieur, that a young officer, the gifted son of a noble father, who is gapable of acting upon his own resbonsibility in a moment of national emergency, has been exonerated from undeserved plame--has met with gomblete rehabilidation at the hands of his suberiors and chiefs. Did I possess the influence once wielded by my klorious ungle, you would be regombensed as you teserve.”

For after this fashion did he misuse the French language: struggling as gamely as any German Professor to keep the g’s from turning out the c’s, the b’s from usurping the places of the p’s ... beset with consonantal difficulties to the ending of his life....

He bowed to the young man of high prospects and great possessions, and solemnly extended the gloved finger-tips of the small effeminate hand. Could it have been, despite his tactful negation of all influence, the hand that had shielded Dunoisse? Was it the hand that shortly afterwards obtained his promotion? One may suspect as much.

* * * * *

At that moment Dunoisse took the utterance for what it seemed worth. He looked into the puffy, leaden face, and as the lifeless eyes glittered back at him from between their half-closed shutters, he knew a base relief, an ignoble joy, in the conviction that Henriette could never have loved this man.

He was quite right. She did not love the man, neither did she love Dunoisse, or any other trousered human. Being a Henriette, she was the lover of Henriette.

True love, pure passion was not to be born in her then,--but long afterwards,--amidst dreadful throes and strivings unspeakable,--the winged child-god was to see the light. Across a gulf of seeming Death his radiant hands were to be outstretched to her. And they were to render her no flowers of joy, but wormwood and rue and rosemary, drenched with the bitter tears of expiation.

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XLI

A few days subsequently to that reception at the Hotel du Rhin, Dunoisse found his friend in tears, and asked the reason. She evaded reply, he pleaded for confidence. Then, little by little, he elicited that Henriette’s sensitive nature was wrung and tortured by the thought of that money borrowed from de Moulny.

Dunoisse asked of her:

“How much was the amount? I have earned the right to know.”

Her heart gave a great throb of triumph, but her eyelids fell in time to veil her exultation. She faltered, in her haste only doubling the sum:

“Sixty thousand francs.” She added, with a dewy glance and a quivering lip: “But do not be distressed for me, dear friend. The money shall be repaid promptly. I have still a few jewels left that were my mother’s. She will not blame me, sweet saint! for parting with her legacy thus.”

He assumed a tone of authority, and forbade her to sacrifice the trinkets. She pleaded, but finally gave in.

“To-morrow,” he told her, “you shall receive from me a hundred thousand francs, in billets of a thousand; the sole condition being that you send de Moulny back his money, and that from the hour that sees me break a vow for you, you swear to borrow from no man save me!”

She hesitated, paled, faltered. He kissed the little hands, and she gave in. Had he been older, and wiser in the ways of the world, knowing that money is power, and that he who holds the key to the cashbox can dictate and be obeyed, he would have been more frugal. As it was, being what he was, he gave liberally with both hands. For there is no prodigal like your poor devil suddenly become rich.

* * * * *

Next day, the dusty check-book that had lain for long years forgotten in the drawer of the lost Marie-Bathilde’s inlaid writing-table, as impotent for good or evil as the son of Eblis in his sealed-up jar, came out and went into Dunoisse’s pocket, and so to the Rue d’Artois. No good angel in the Joinville cravat and the short-waisted, high-collared frock-coat of a somewhat rowdy young Captain of piou-pious met Hector on the steps of Rothschild’s Bank on this occasion.

He went in. The double doors thudded behind him; the polite, well-dressed Head Cashier looked observantly through his brazen lattice at the young man with the hard, brilliant black eyes and the face like a thin ruddy flame. He bowed with profound respect, did the stately functionary, when he heard the name of the owner of a deposit account of one million, one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs, and sent a clerk with a message to the Manager. And a personage even statelier, wearing black silk shorts--you still occasionally saw them in 1848--and hair-powder,--a being with the benignant air of a Bishop and a dentist’s gleaming smile,--issued from a shining cage at the end of a long vista of dazzling counters, and condescendingly assisted at the drawing of the First Check. Its magnitude made him smile more benignantly than ever.... The Head Cashier’s checking thumb quivered with emotion as it rapidly counted over a bulky roll of thousand-franc notes.

But, the happy owner of these crackling potentialities departed, the Manager returned to his golden cage, sat down and indited a little note to Marshal Dunoisse. Which missive, conveyed to the old gentleman’s residence by an official in the Bank livery of sober gray, badged with silver, made its recipient--not chuckle, as one might have supposed, but gnash his costly teeth, and stamp up and down the room and swear.

For the old brigand of Napoleon’s army, the indefatigable schemer for Widinitz dignities, had been proud--after a strange, incomprehensible fashion--of the incorruptible honesty, the high principle, the unstained honor of his son. The Marshal had gloated over the set face of endurance with which the Spartan youth had borne the gnawing of the fox Poverty, beneath his shabby uniform. And that thumping check on Rothschild’s cost him a fit of the gout. When his apothecary had dosed and lotioned the enemy into partial submission, you may suppose the old man hobbling up the wide, shallow, Turkey-carpeted staircase to those rooms of Hector’s to find them vacant--their late occupant removed to a palatial suite of bachelor apartments occupying the first floor of a courtyard-mansion in the Rue du Bac. A million odd of francs will not last forever; forty-five thousand English sovereigns--smooth, slippery, elusive darlings!--do not constitute a Fortunatus’ purse; and yet the sum represents a handsome golden cheese with which to set up housekeeping; though such sharp little gleaming teeth and such tiny white, insatiable hands belonged to the mouse that was from this date to have the run of Hector Dunoisse’s cupboard, that in a marvelously short space of time the golden cheese was to be nibbled quite away.

Henriette had carried out her tacit understanding with Monseigneur. She had lifted up her finger, and a golden plum of a hundred-thousand francs had fallen from the shaken tree. Do you suppose de Moulny had been paid? do you imagine that the Baal of her worship was to be propitiated with all that glittering coin?

Not a bit of it! For this Henriette, like all the others, had huge debts and rapacious creditors, the necessity of being always beautiful cost so much. And de Roux had his horses, gambling-losses, and nymphs of the Opera to maintain and satisfy and keep in good humor. And pious ladies, collecting at Church functions for the benefit of the poor, have been known ere now to slip their jeweled hands into the velvet bag, weighed down with the gold and silver contributions of the faithful, and withdraw the said hands richer than they went in.

The Empire was the religion of Henriette, and she made her collection in its interests tirelessly. If no more than a moiety of what she gathered clinked into the High Priest’s coffers, he did not know that--any more than those who had emptied their purses to fill the bag, so nobody was the worse.

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XLII

The reader has not been invited to contemplate, in the person of Dunoisse, the phenomenon of the Young Man of Virtue. Of kindred passions with his fellow-men, of unblemished health, hot blood and vivid imagination, he was, per grace of certain honorable principles instilled into a boy’s mind by a poor old gentlewoman, no less than by an innate delicacy and fastidiousness, a cleanly liver: a man whom Poverty had schooled in self-restraint. Now Poverty was banished, and self-restraint was flung to the winds. And, regrettable as it is to have to state the fact, the lapse of Miss Caroline Smithwick’s late pupil from the narrow path of Honor was attended by no chidings of conscience, visited by no prickings of remorse.

Dunoisse was happy. The world took on a brighter aspect, the air he breathed seemed purer and more fragrant, the sunshine brighter and the moonlight lovelier, because of this his sin.

The eyes of men and women--especially of women!--met his own more kindly; there was no sense of strangeness barring social intercourse.... Life was pleasanter as the months rolled into years.

People found him agreeable now--a charming fellow. He was asked everywhere, petted and flattered, quoted and caressed. Not only because he spent his money lavishly, but because there is a freemasonry between the votaries of illicit pleasure which does not extend to the conscientious and cleanly. Vice is a boon-companion in whose society you may lounge unbuttoned. Virtue and Integrity are the two flagrant offenses the world can never pardon or condone.

An agreeable, even brilliant man: well-bred, well-read, and in one branch at least of his profession, marvelously competent. These were among the encomiums bestowed by his world upon Dunoisse, who learned to dress in the height of the prevailing fashion; to spend heaps of money upon jewelry, cigars, wines, restaurant-dinners and little suppers, and to lose as much at cards in a single night at the Club as would have formerly kept him for a year. Other things indispensable to a young man moving in the inner circle of fast Parisian Society were mastered by him in due course--such as the art of living on terms of daily, familiar, friendly intercourse with a man hated, loathed, and envied above all men. Also, the secret of saying one thing and conveying another; the art of taking formal leave and slipping back again; and of applying to the solution of every sum of existence the Ancient Rule of Three.

* * * * *

For in spite of Adjmeh and one or two other brief amatory episodes, the Book of the Ways of Women had not until now been placed open between the hands of Hector Dunoisse.

When you have read that book from Preface to Finis you will have learned much, and yet not all there is to learn. For every page of the manuscript is a palimpsest. When the writing is washed off with tears of blood, the true characters start out from their concealment, the mystery of mysteries is revealed.

But no man has ever lived long enough to master that Book from cover to cover, though some, wiser or more patient than their fellows, have learned a chapter or two by heart before they died. And those deep scholars know that it is never possible to determine whether a woman be prompted to the gift of her beauty and the sacrifice of her honor by love of herself, or love of him who covets it. And also they are aware that the last chapter of the tome is never to be finished. Some Henriette adds a fresh gloss to it every day.

Dunoisse read in that Book with raptures and exultations, and fierce delight and passionate triumph. He was to read it with agonies and humiliations and galling, unspeakable shame. He was to shed secret scalding tears over the cruel pages. He was to laugh over them with the laughter that is born of despair. But the sweetness of honey came before the tang of gall, the pleasure before the torment. So it was and will be while the world goes spinning round.

Women like Henriette give out fascination as radium dispenses its invisible energies. Every tone of their voices is a call, every glance an appeal or an invitation, every rustle of their garments, every heave of their bosoms, constitutes an appeal to the senses and a stimulant to the passions of men.

She was half-a-dozen women in one; you were master of a whole harem of beauties possessing her; a jewel cut in innumerable facets lay in your hand. She could be fierce and tender, pathetic and cynical, gay and sorrowful, delicate and robust, in the space of half-an-hour. Cigarettes calmed her nerves; moonlight, music, tiny glasses of Benedictine, and minute pills of Turkish opium. Chloral and morphia had not at that date been discovered, else what a votary of the tabloid would have been found in Henriette.

She adored sweets, Chinese bezique and good cookery. Green oysters, bouillabaisse, poulet sauté Marengo, and peaches in Kirsch, were among her passions. But she was a pious Catholic, and observed with scrupulous rigor the fasts and feasts of the Church.

She had campaigned with the 999th in Algeria, wore a dagger sometimes in her girdle; carried a tiny ivory-and-silver mounted pistol--fellow to one de Moulny kept locked up--and was expert in its use, as in the handling of the fencing-foil and the womanlier weapon, the needle. What webs of cunning embroidery grew under those little fingers! She wrought at these, sometimes for days together. Then she would pine for exercise and the open air: ride furiously in the Bois, with her plumed hat cocked à la mousquetaire, and her silver-gray veil and smoke-colored habit streaming; use the jeweled whip until her horse lathered, drive home the little silver-gilt spur of the dainty polished boot until his flank was specked with blood. Or she would shoot pigeons at Tivoli, handling her gun with ease, and vying with crack masculine sportsmen in her skilled capacity for slaughter. Or she would be driven in her barouche or landau, lying back among her silken cushions, as though too indolent to lift an eyelash, languid and voluptuous as any odalisque. Returning from these excursions, she would lie upon the sofa, silent, pale and mysterious, her vinaigrette at her nostrils, a silken handkerchief bound about her brows. For a crown of diamonds she could not, would not go to theater, or ball, or supper that night! She was fit to die--wanted nothing but to be left in solitude.... But she never failed to go; and towards the end of some gay, boisterous midnight banquet she would move with that long, gliding, supple step of hers into the middle of the room, and dance you the cachucha, with coffee-spoons for castanets, if nobody could produce these.

Who could resist her then? With the proud little head swaying on the rounded throat, and the long eyes darting fiery glances as the lithe body swung, and whirled, and the white arms beckoned and waved. With the silken swish of skirts calling attention to the lovely supple curve that went from hip to knee, and from the swelling calf to the delicate rounded ankle, and bidding you note and worship the elastic arch of the Andalusian instep, under which water could run and never wet the sole....

Nor was she less bewitching, be sure, at those other moments when Dunoisse would be alone with her; when, snatching her Spanish guitar from clumsier hands, she would warble the naughtiest ballads of the cafés chantant, reproducing the cynical improprieties of Fanny Hervieu or Georgette Bis-Bis, with inimitable chic and go. Or she would sing a Spanish love-song, vibrating with Southern passion; or sigh forth some Irish ballad, breathing of the green isle whence Norah Murphy sailed, to conquer with her beauty a guerrilla chief of Spain, and bear him Henriette, and die of sorrow; bequeathing her daughter a passionate, emotional nature and an hereditary religion, and the memory of some kisses and cradle-songs.

The simile of the changeful fay in the rainbow was never inappropriate to her. What a charming mingling of inconsistencies, what a creature of contradictions was she.... When her Brazilian cockatoo “Coco,” a magnificent bird, emerald-green as the Prince-Pretender’s dress-waistcoat, with a crest of sulphur-yellow and a beak as crimson as the Colonel’s own, was murdered by the Convent tom-cat, how tragic was her grief! Coco was interred in the Convent gardens, beautiful still in those days, though filched from even then for the builders’ diabolical uses. And the glove-box that served Henriette’s slaughtered darling as a coffin had been won at a pigeon-shooting match at Tivoli....

Those decapitated birds, fluttering on the smooth green turf in their death-struggles, had not drawn from the beautiful eyes a single tear. But Coco, who had been taught to shriek “Vive l’Empereur!” when he wanted fruit or bonbons, with loyalty quite as genuine as M. de Persigny’s--Coco was quite a different affair....

Mistigris must pay the death-penalty--upon that point Coco’s bereaved mistress was inexorable. The Augustinian Sisters pleaded for their darling; Madame de Roux would not budge. When she spoke of an appeal to the authorities--never reluctant at any time to impose penalties upon the Church--the Sisters caved in. At any rate, they ultimately produced a tail.... And whether the caudal appendage had really belonged to Mistigris, or had been filched from an old cat-skin belonging to the portress, touched up with red ink at the end where it had been attached to the original wearer, to impart a delusive air of freshness, was never absolutely known. When a cat strangely resembling Mistigris, but called by another name, attracted the attention of Coco’s bereaved mistress a few weeks later, the retort was unanswerable:

“But see, Madame--he has a tail!”

* * * * *

That tail was a morsel that stuck in Dunoisse’s throat. Another thing, as difficult to swallow, was the undeniable, apparent fact of the amiable, even affectionate relations existing between Madame de Roux and her fiery-faced, dyed, bandoliered and corseted mate.... A further, even more indigestible discovery, was, that although the springs of the young bride’s heart had been so early frozen at their sources by etc., etc., the union of the couple had been blessed by children.

Three little girls in pigtails with ribbon bows, and Scotch plaid pelisses, ending in the dreadful frilled-cambric funnels that more adult skirts concealed, and which were known as pantalettes. Happening to come across a daguerreotyped group of these darlings--Henriette had been turning out a drawer in her writing-table--Dunoisse inquired who the children were? And was horribly discomfited at her reply:

“They are mine. Didn’t you know? Do you think them like me?”

* * * * *

They certainly were not like her. Nor did they resemble de Roux. And she kissed the three glassy countenances, and murmured caressingly:

“My treasures!”

Adding, as Dunoisse looked round, uncertain whether the treasures might not appear in answer to this ebullition of maternal tenderness:

“They do not live with us, but with their foster-mother at Bagneres: an excellent person--married to a market-gardener. They had measles when last I heard of them, so of course I cannot go there just now. When they are well again you must see them. Ah! how I hope they will love you!... Dear, what is the matter now?”

Dunoisse did not quite know. But he was sensible of a vigorous growth of distaste for plaid pelisses in combination with frilled pantalettes, and for at least a week, pigtails, whenever encountered--and they were everywhere--smote upon his naked conscience like scourges set with thorns.

He rid himself of the absurd obsession presently, and was happier than ever. The world was a gay, bright, pleasant place when one took it easily, and did not demand too much virtue of oneself or the people of one’s set.

But yet, on those rare occasions when one was hipped and blue with overmuch wine, or gambling, or pleasure, there were moments when the words of that old boyish vow, so earnestly made, so painfully kept, so recently broken, would start out against the background of half-conscious thought as plainly as the Writing on the Wall, and he would hear himself saying to a woman whose face he had nearly forgotten, that he hoped the day that should see him broach that banked-up store of thousands might bear him fruit of retribution, in bitterness, and sorrow, and shame....

What a fool he had been!--what a narrow-minded, straitlaced idiot! Why, the money had procured Dunoisse everything that was worth having in the world.

The open companionship and secret possession of a beautiful, amorous, high-bred woman; the friendship of many others, only a little less adorable, and the good-fellowship of crowds of agreeable men. Membership of many fashionable Clubs, invitations to all the best houses. His brevet as Major, or chef de bataillon, though the General Staff appointment that should have accompanied it unaccountably delayed upon the road. And to cap all, life had been made yet easier by the removal of de Roux to a distant post abroad.

For happy as Dunoisse was, it had been constantly borne in upon him that he would be a great deal happier if the reproach of this man’s presence could be removed.

He hinted as much to Henriette. She looked at him with sweet, limpid eyes of astonishment. What! did he actually feel like that? How odd!

Dunoisse was secretly a little angry with her for not understanding. It showed a want of delicacy, not suspected in her before.

“Poor Eugène! So easy-going, good-humored and amiable. And you really wish him ... out of the way?”

She crumpled her slender eyebrows and pondered a while, her little jeweled fingers cupping her adorable chin. “Perhaps the Prince-President could offer him some foreign appointment,” she said at last. “Monseigneur is always so good!”

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XLIII

For the honest citizen Charles Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had been duly returned in June for the Department of the Seine and two other Departments. The end of the month saw the streets up again: barricades rising one after the other; saw the military called out, saw cannon and howitzer battering down the crazy strongholds of insurrection; saw men in top-hats and frock-coats, armed with revolvers, and men in blouses armed with muskets, defending these works with desperation, as long as cartridges held out.

It was borne in upon Monseigneur Affre, Archbishop of Paris, that he should go forth and speak to the insurgents of St. Antoine. He hesitated but an instant. No doubt of the Voice that urged. So he went, preceded by the Crucifix, accompanied by his Vicars-General; and a man in a blouse walked before the Cross-bearer carrying a green branch in his hand. No one knew who the man was, or ever saw him afterwards. Catholics have whispered that the bearer of the green branch was no other than St. Antoine himself.

They shot the Archbishop from an upper window as he exhorted his flock to lay down their muskets, in the Name of Him Who bled upon the Tree. He sank down, mortally wounded, raised himself with a great effort, made the sign of absolution over a dying insurgent who was being carried past him, and fell back upon the bloody stones.... There was a great cry of horror from those who saw: the Archbishop was carried back to his palace, and passed to God upon the day following. But the green branch had triumphed: the servant of Christ had not died for nothing. The insurrection was virtually at an end.

Paris was sick of the reek of gunpowder and bloodshed. She longed for peace, and quiet, and a stable form of government--just the thing that seemed hardest to attain.

In the caricatures of Gavarni you may see the bemused and worried citizen torn by doubts as to which form of Republic, of all the countless varieties pressed upon the French nation by political quacks and nostrum-mongers, might be the most agreeable to take, and the most efficacious in its method of working. M. Prud’homme of the National Guard, no less than Jerome Paturôt of the Gardes Mobiles, and Jacques Bonhomme, his country cousin, were propitiated and soothed by the mildness of Representative Bonaparte’s drugs, and the good sense and moderation of his views; while the feasibility and simplicity of the measures he advocated enchanted everyone who heard.

Candidate for the Presidency, with what modesty and good sense he expressed himself. What noble enthusiasm glowed in him, for instance, when he said:

“The Democratic Republic shall be my religion, and I will be its High Priest.”

Meaning:

“The Empire shall be the religion of the French people, the Tuileries its Temple, and I will be the god, enthroned and worshiped there!”

Words like these won him the Presidential elbow-chair on the platform behind the tribune, placed in his neat white hand the coveted little bell with the horizontal handle; procured for him, who had been reduced to pawning-straits to pay the rent of his London lodging, palatial quarters in the Palace of the Élysée at the end of the Faubourg Saint Honoré.

* * * * *

The taking of the Presidential Oath exorcised that haunting specter, arrayed in the rags of the Imperial mantle,--adorned with the fleurons from the caparison of Childeric’s steed of war. Banished, the grisly phantom sank down into its gorgeous sepulchre. Calumny was silenced, suspicion was changed into confidence, France reposed her ringleted head in chaste abandonment upon the irreproachable waistcoat of her First Citizen, who waited for nothing but the laying of the submarine cable between Calais and Dover, the passing of the Bill restoring to the President of the National Assembly the right of absolute command over the military and naval forces of the country, to toss the trustful fair one over his saddle-bow, leap up behind her, and gallop--with his swashbuckling, roystering band of freebooters thundering upon his heels, with the shouts and pistol-shots of indignant pursuers dying upon the distance--away into the frosty December night.

* * * * *

France was to lose her Cap of Liberty as the result of that furious ride of the night of the coup d’État, and something more besides....

But in the meanwhile she was content, suspecting no designs against her honor, and the Prince-President, established at the Palace of the Élysée, made himself very much at home.

Not that he cared about the place--he infinitely preferred the Tuileries. But by day the audience-rooms were packed with gold-encrusted uniforms and irreproachable dress-coats: and by night the whole place blazed with gaslight. Soirées, concerts, dinners, balls, and hunting-parties at St. Cloud or Fontainebleau, succeeded balls, dinners, concerts and soirées; and after the crush had departed there were suppers, modeled on the Regency pattern, lavish, luxurious, meretricious, at which the intimate male friends of the host were privileged to be dazzled by a galaxy of beauties dressed to slay; scintillating with jewels; lovely women who recalled the vanished splendors, as they reproduced the frailties, of the Duchesse de Berry and Madame de Phalaris.

His “flying squadron” he was wont to term them. They were of infinite use to him in the seduction and entanglement of young and gifted, or wealthy and influential men. With what enchanting grace and stateliness they rode the ocean, broke upon the breeze their sable flag of piracy, unmasked their deadly bow-chasers, and brought their broadside batteries to bear. How prettily they sacked and plundered their grappled, helpless prizes. With what magnificent indifference they saw their livid prisoners walk the plank that ended in the salt green wave and the gray shark’s maw.

The Henriette, that clipping war-frigate, had brought much grist to the mills of Monseigneur.

Therefore could he deny her this simple favor, the speedy removal of an inconvenient husband? When the soft caressing voice murmured the plaintive entreaty, Monseigneur stroked the chin-tuft that had not yet become an imperial, and thought the thing might be arranged.

De Roux was not an indispensable digit in connection with the brain that worked in the Élysée. He was of the old school of military commander, deeply imbued, in spite of all his Bonapartist professions, with the traditions of the Monarchy defunct. His removal from the command of the 999th of the Line had been contemplated for some time.

And the General in charge of the Military Garrison at Algiers was desirous to resign his responsibilities in favor of a Home command, if one could be found presenting equal advantages in point of pay. Government, just at this juncture, could not afford to increase the emoluments of the only post that appeared suitable. But if a certain sum of money were placed, unquestioningly, at the disposal of Government, the difficulty might be smoothed away.

For money was badly needed at the Palace of the Élysée. Money, if one would make supple, servile agents of legal, civil and military officials and functionaries--judges, prefects, mayors, magistrates, commissaries of police, senators, counselors, brigadiers, generals, colonels, quarter-masters, sergeants, gendarmes, agents, printers, spies.

Money must be had if the plot that was to make an Imperial throne out of a Presidential armchair was not to collapse and fall through.

So the Élysée had become a shop on a vast scale, where anything desired of men or women with cash in hand could be bought for ready money. A dismissal or an appointment; a night of pleasure for yourself, or a day of reckoning for another; the advancement of a lover or the removal of a rival,--you ordered and paid, and got it on the nail. And the gold you paid was passed on into the innumerable pockets that gaped for it. Everyone who had a soul to sell found a buyer at the Élysée.

What Dunoisse wanted cost a heap of money. The cashier at Rothschild’s had long ceased to be reverential,--every month’s audit showed such terrific inroads on the diminishing golden store. His eyebrows were almost insulting as he cashed the check that purchased exile for Henriette’s inconvenient husband. Dunoisse began from that moment to realize that he had wasted his patrimony, and would very soon be poor.

Yet what a satisfaction it was to read in the official Gazette of the Army, that in recognition of the eminent services of Colonel Count de Roux, the War Minister had appointed that distinguished officer to the vacant post of Commandant of the Garrison at Algiers.

“You see, the Prince keeps his promises,” Henriette said gleefully to her lover. “Believe me, dearest, the Empire is an excellent investment!--a ship that is bound to come home!”

They were together in the Rue du Bac, where every room of the luxurious suite bore evidences of her taste, tokens of her presence. And she was leaning over Hector’s shoulder as he read the paragraph, her fragrant breath playing on his eyes and forehead, her small white fingers toying with his hair.

“It will suit Eugène to a marvel,” she went on, as no immediate answer came from Dunoisse. “He will have his cards and his billiards, his cigars and his horses, and his mistresses, and everything that he has here.”

She added, with a little mocking peal of laughter:

“Except me. Imagine it!--he actually believes that I am going with him to Algiers--that horrible piratical Moorish seaport, full of negroes and Arabs and monkeys and smells. We shall have a scene when he learns that I remain behind in Paris--he has already been quite tragic over the idea of parting from ’Riette and Loulu and Bébé. He cried--imagine him in tears!--and said that he should never see them again--he was quite certain of it! And he has gone to Bagneres to-day with a cartload of toys and bonbons. Oh yes!--he is absurdly fond of the children. It is not because he did not wish them to live with us that you have not seen them at home.”

Dunoisse knew a sudden sickness at the heart. She had given this very explanation unasked. So, then, those lovely lips could lie.... The warm, soft arm about his neck suddenly seemed heavy as an iron collar, the fragrant breath upon his eyes scorched. He freed himself from Henriette with a sudden movement; rose up, dropping the newspaper; and went to the open window and stepped out upon the balcony, seeking a purer air.

Thence he said, without looking round:

“He loves ’Riette and Loulou and Bébé, I suppose, as a man usually loves his children. Is there anything absurd in that? Perhaps you know?”

She leaped at him and caught him by the arm, and said, from behind him, in a voice jarred and shaken with strange passion:

“What--what do you mean? You shall tell me! Look round! Do not hide your face!”

He had meant nothing. His utterance had been prompted by a sudden stab of compunction, a feeling of pity for the man whom he had betrayed and supplanted, and was now about to exile. But when he turned and met the sharp suspicion in the eyes of Henriette, he knew what she believed he had meant. And with that new and strange expression in them, those lovely eyes seemed to look at him through the holes of an exquisite mask, hiding another face, that, once revealed, would chill the soul with dread, and stamp its Medusa-image on the memory--never to be forgotten, however long one lived.

His own face looked strangely at him from the frames of mirrors that gave back its hardened outlines and less brilliant coloring. Treachery had always been loathsome in Dunoisse’s eyes. Yet of what else had he been guilty but the blackest treachery in his dealings with the husband of Henriette?

Deny it! What? Had he not taken his hand in friendship and betrayed him? Procured his removal by bribery, parted him from the woman whose truth he believed in, and from the children whom he loved?

Quite true, the man was vile. A lover of gross pleasures, a debauchee, a gambler. An unfaithful husband to a wife who played him false. False! Ah! to use that word in connection with Henriette opened out incredible vistas. Dunoisse dared not look. Long afterwards he understood that he had feared lest he should see the day of his own exile growing into vision--drawing nearer and more near.

* * * * *

So exit de Roux with the brevet-rank of General, after a farewell banquet from the Regiment and a series of parting dinners; amidst speeches, embraces, vivas, and votive pieces of plate. Madame did not accompany the new Garrison Commandant to the conquered stronghold of the Algerine pirates. The General’s villa at Mustapha was to receive a grass-widower. Henriette’s delicate health could not support the winds from the Sahara,--the Prince-President’s own physician, much to the chagrin of his fair patient, advised against her taking the risk.

And Dunoisse breathed more freely once his whilom Chief had departed. De Roux had been the kill-joy--the fly in the honey. Life was more pleasant now, and infinitely easier; there were so many things that had had to be done under the rose.

As for de Roux, his exile was not without the alleviations and consolations Henriette had mentioned. He wrote home regularly, voluminous letters of many pages, and sent mysterious bales containing astonishing gifts;--Moorish caps, embroidered gazelle-skins, ornaments of sequins, coffee-cups in stands of golden filagree, for Madame: with ebony elephants and ivory dolls, dates preserved in honey, fig cakes stuck full of walnuts, and cinnamon-sugar walking-sticks, for ’Riette and Loulou and Bébé.

Handsome remittances always accompanied the letters. Dunoisse stipulated that the mony should be exclusively expended on, or laid aside for the benefit of, the three little pigtailed girls. It was a nice point, a question of delicacy, from which he was not to be turned aside by any subtle pleading. For you may build your nest of the wreckage of another man’s home, and still retain your claim to be considered a person of scrupulous honor. But to dip your hand in his purse--that is a different thing!

So our hero, presently finding himself at the end of his resources, fulfilled a certain paternal prophecy, uttered when he was yet a student at the Military School of Technical Instruction, and called one day at the hotel in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, prepared to consume a certain amount of humble-pie, provided that at the bottom of the unsavory dish the golden plums should be scattered thick enough.

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