The Lost King E-Book

Sabatini Rafael

• Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The Lost King tells the story of Louis XVII – the French royal who officially died at the age of ten but, as legend has it, escaped to foreign lands where he lived to an old age. Sabatini breathes life into these age-old myths, creating a story of passion, revenge and betrayal. He tells of how the young child escaped to Switzerland from where he plotted his triumphant return to claim the throne of France.

Leseprobe

The Lost King

by Rafael Sabatini

First published in 1937

This edition published by Reading Essentials

Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The Lost King

by

Rafael Sabatini

PART I

CHAPTER I. HIS MAJESTY

Anaxagoras Chaumette, the Procurator-Syndic of the Commune, had asserted with ostentatious confidence that he would take a King and make of him a Man.

In the comely, flaxen-haired lad of eight who sat on the sofa, swinging his short legs and expressing himself with a volubility occasionally incoherent, in the language of the gutter, the Citizen Chaumette contemplated the success of his noble alchemy. It confirmed him in his sincere belief that even such corrupt and unpromising material as Royalty, possesses a latent fund of honest, genuine humanity, which, if pains are taken, may be brought to the surface.

Here the pains had been taken, on Chaumette's prescription, by Antoine Simon, the sometime shoemaker whom he had appointed preceptor to the royal child. A broad lump of a man, tricked out in the fine blue coat adopted as the proper livery of an office that carried emoluments amounting to some ten thousand livres a year, Simon leaned with possessive airs upon the back of the sofa. He was proudly conscious that he deserved not only the approval of Chaumette for the triumph of his tutorship, but also of the Citizen Hébert for the obvious care with which he had inculcated the unspeakable lesson his pupil was at this moment delivering.

Hébert, the dainty, foppish sewer-rat who edited with such elaborate obscenity that organ of the Cordeliers, the Père Duchesne, sat gravely listening, exchanging ever and anon a glance with his gross bespectacled associate. Now and then, when there was a failure in the monotonous volubility of His Majesty's recitation, Hébert would coaxingly interpose a leading question that would renew the flow of that terrible stream.

At the table, beside Pache, the burly, impassive mayor, who in some sort presided, a young municipal officer named Daujou, acting here as secretary, was writing rapidly. His lips were compressed, and there was a horror in his eyes. Long afterwards he was to tell the world that he did not believe a word of the utterances he was recording.

At moments the virtuous Anaxagoras, his sensibilities outraged, would blow out his fat, sensuous lips, and show the whites of his eyes behind his spectacles. Thus he advertised his dismay of disclosures by which Hébert was to ensure the triumph of the Republican austerity for which he battled.

This fervent zeal of Hébert's had taken alarm, as is well known, at a whisper that by the approaching trial of the Queen, the Committee of Public Safety hoped to bring Austria to negotiate for her deliverance. Should that Messalina be let loose again upon the world? Not as long as he had a pen and a tongue for whose utterances in the cause of his sublime idealism nothing was too foul.

In a foam of obscenely virtuous fury he had harangued the Jacobins. "In your name I have promised the head of Antoinette to the sansculottes, and I will give it to them if I have to go and cut it off myself."

Consumed by that same burning zeal he had sought the Public Prosecutor. Tinville had thrust out a dubious lip over the Queen's dossier. "It's a poor case at best, my friend. There is hardly enough to make conviction certain. And there are political considerations against pressing even the existing charges."

Hébert consigned political considerations to the nethermost hell. Theirs was a righteous, enlightened age that had made an end of political trickery. Additional charges must be discovered so as to baffle the traitors and intriguers who dreamed of an acquittal.

To discover them he sought his friend Chaumette, a man in whose bosom he discerned the glow of as pure a flame of republican altruism as in his own.

I find it odd that in seeking additional charges with which to bring that unhappy woman to the scaffold, Hébert should have made no use of that atrocious piece of scandal for which the brother of the late King was primarily responsible. The Count of Provence had resented from boyhood his cadetship and the fact that the crown, which he believed himself so fully qualified to wear, must go to his elder brother. The protracted childlessness of Louis XVI kept him for a while in the hope that Fate would yet make amends to him. Then, seven years after her marriage, Marie-Antoinette gave birth to a daughter, and three years later to a son. But even these events did not cause him to despair. It was soon apparent that the sickly son could not live, and it began to look as if no further children would follow. At the end of another four years, however, in 1785, the healthy, robust Louis-Charles, who was so soon to become Dauphin, made his bow to the world, and frustrated his uncle's last hope.

The Count of Provence was a curious compound of astuteness and stupidity, of dignity and buffoonery; but I will not do him the injustice to suppose that he did not first persuade himself of the truth of the scandal whose dissemination he zealously furthered. We are so prone to believe that which suits our purposes, and particularly charges that are damaging to those whom we dislike; and dislike was as strong as it was mutual between the Count of Provence and Marie-Antoinette.

Could it be believed, he plaintively asked his intimates, that a marriage barren for seven years should suddenly of itself become fruitful? Was it not at least suspicious, and was it not manifest that Count Fersen's attentions to the frivolous Queen were too assiduous to be honourable? Could anyone seriously doubt that the handsome, devoted Swede was Her Majesty's lover, and that Monsieur the Dauphin was a bastard?

That slander, discreetly hushed yet venomously active, spread from Court to city, from Versailles to Paris. With the scandal of the necklace and the ribald inventions concerning the Queen's relations with the Polignacs, it supplied yet another weapon to those who strove to bring the monarchy into contempt.

The Count of Provence in his fatuity, and until he took fright and fled the storm, had actually displayed Jacobinistic leanings. It was his silly hope that the men of the new ideas would on those grounds and in his own favour exclude the Dauphin from the succession.

There was matter here for Hébert, since in all times the adultery of a queen has been high treason. But perhaps treason to a throne could not logically be made to count for much with a people who had destroyed the throne, or perhaps the accusation was not loathly enough to satisfy Hébert's political prurience. Instead, he preferred another and grosser iniquity which he claimed to have discovered in the Queen's conduct.

He discussed it with Chaumette. Chaumette, this squalid adventurer who had lived impurely ever since, at the age of thirteen, he had been kicked out of an ecclesiastical college, was overcome with horror. He had buried his peasant face in his coarse red hands.

"Forgive this weakness. In spite of the loathing with which kings inspire me, it still remains that I am a man."

After that obscure outburst, he mastered his emotions, and went to work. He schooled Simon in the lesson in which Simon in his turn was to school the boy; a boy kept in a half-fuddled state with brandy, so as to dull his naturally keen perceptions; a boy who had been taught to deck his utterances freely with every obscenity in the language, until the speech of the gutterlings had come to replace upon his innocent lips the courtly diction of Versailles.

Listening now to the boy's depositions, Chaumette had as much cause to be satisfied with the manner as Hébert with the matter of them. Each hoped confidently that all present would be properly impressed. There were, besides the boy, nine of them altogether, in that room on the second floor of the Temple Tower, which had been inhabited by Louis XVI during his captivity, and was now a part of the lodging of Simon and his wife and their charge. It was a well-appointed chamber, for neither in his furniture nor in his table had the late King been unduly stinted. On a settle in rose brocade that was ranged against the wall, two members of the COmmune who were that day on duty, Heussé, a chocolate-maker, and Séguy, a doctor, sat listening in shocked gravity. In the background, Jacques Louis David, the pageant-master of the Revolution, the painter whom the generous patronage of Louis XVI had rendered famous, occupied a tall-backed chair, with young Florence la Salle, his most promising pupil, on a stool close beside him. They sat with their shoulders to the window, which was placed so high in the wall that a man might not look out of it save by standing on a chair, and La Salle, his legs crossed, rested an open sketch-book on his knee.

He sat tapping his teeth with the butt of his pencil. Lost in a dreamy wistfulness, his wide-set, luminous, dark-blue eyes pondered the boy. Thus until a prod from David aroused him. The master set a finger to the drawing La Salle had made.

"More weight in that line," he growled under his breath.

He grunted approval when it was done, a smile on his hideous face, so scornfully twisted by the cyst that defaced his upper lip. "You see how it changes the value of the whole? What a sense of depth is gained? Less drawing, Florence. Fewer lines. Only those that really count." He touched the young man affectionately on the shoulder, and rumbled on. "The likeness could not be truer. You have the trick of that. If only you would cultivate austerity. Austerity."

"I will try again," the pupil murmured. He turned a page of his sketch-book, and shifted his stool away from the master's chair, ostensibly so as to obtain a view of his subject from a fresh angle.

But he did not at once begin to draw. His rather saturnine face as expressionless as a mask, he continued from under his black brows to study the boy who still chattered his vile lesson.

The little King, small for his age, and plump, was dressed in a green carmagnole, with a tricolour cockade plastered on the breast of it. His round, fair-skinned face was unnaturally flushed, its winsomeness marred now by the childish jactancy of the boy who apes the airs and manners of a grown man. There was an unnatural glitter in the blue eyes under their high-arching brows, an unpleasant lack of control about the slightly hare-toothed mouth, from which those men were drawing the falsehoods that should send his mother to the guillotine.

Suddenly, whilst considering him, La Salle was vouchsafed that wider, deeper vision the lack of which David was for ever lamenting in him.

"You are a great draughtsman, Florence," the master had told him more than once. "But for all your draughtsmanship you will not be an artist until either wit or emotion informs your work."

In a flash he had perceived how either might inform it here. In this wretched besotted boy he discovered a subject for cynical, soulless humour or for profoundest tragedy, according to the spirit of him to whom the artist's vision was vouchsafed.

His pencil worked rapidly and surely; and, with an economy of line that presently delighted David, he accomplished a sketch that was at once a portrait and a story.

Whilst he had been working, the boy's depositions had come to an end. Pache, the mayor, had cleared his throat to ask if that were all, and Chaumette the atheist who had invented the Goddess of Reason, called now upon the Divinity he had been active in abolishing, to bear witness that it was more than enough: a supper of horrors possible only within the ambit of the canker of Royalty. Thereupon Pache had opined that they had better come to the confrontations, and Daujou was sent to fetch Marie-Thérèse Capet from the floor above just as La Salle completed his sketch.

In the pause Hébert had risen and had sauntered round to look over La Salle's shoulder at the drawing. He had mincingly commended it. The student paid no heed to him. He sat bemused, apparently insensible even to the word of praise that David let fall. But Hébert was insistent and desired others to share his artistic satisfaction.

"By your leave, citizen," he said, and took the sketchbook from La Salle.

He carried it to the table, and leaning forward between Pache and Chaumette invited their attention to it.

Chaumette adjusted his spectacles. He looked from the sketch to the boy, and back again to the sketch. He made a chortling sound.

"The devil's in his pencil," he approved. He nudged his neighbour. "Look, Pache."

But Pache, swollen with the importance of his office and its functions, perceived in this an unpardonable levity. Irritably he thrust the sketch-book away from him.

"Don't pester me with these trifles. Have you no sense of our purpose here?"

"Trifles!" said Hébert, as he gathered up the book. "This is not a trifle. Futurity may account it a historical document." And superciliously he added: "A pity that you have no culture, Pache."

He was restoring the book to its owner when the door opened again and was held by Daujou for Madame Royale.

La Salle's compassionate eyes studied this slight, pallid girl of sixteen, dressed in deep mourning, between whom and the boy on the sofa the resemblance was remarkable. She had the same flaxen hair, white skin and blue eyes, the same arching, brows, so marked in her case as to lend her countenance an expression of perpetual astonishment. Her softly rounded chin lacked the dimple that was impressed in his, but the lines of the mouth were very similar, and there was the same forward thrust of the upper lip.

From the day when first she could stand on her own feet she had been an object of the deepest homage. The noblest and greatest men and women of the kingdom had formally ranged themselves at her passage through the galleries or avenues of Versailles, had stood to receive her commands, had bowed low or had curtsied to the ground in humblest reverence of her august rank. Only the irrefragable consciousness that by right of birth nothing less was her due, sustained now—child though she might be—the almost disdainful self-command with which she confronted the ostentatious disrespect of these coarse men. In her eyes their offensive attitudes diminished not her, but themselves. From what she was, from what she had been born, no grossness in their conduct could detract.

Only for a moment had she shown a sign of dismay, and that was when first her glance alighted on her brother, and she beheld the green carmagnole and gaily striped waistcoat worn at a time when decency dictated that like herself he should have been in mourning for their lately martyred father.

After that she disdainfully confronted these men who remained seated in her presence, so as to mark the equality of which they were apostles. Pache as well as the two functionaries on the settee even retained their cockaded hats, in the band of one of which—Heussé's—were displayed an identity-card—his carte de civisme—and a card of membership of the Jacobins. Séguy was smoking, and Chaumette, suddenly fearful lest his bareheadedness might be misconstrued, reached for his hat with its bunch of tricolour plumes, and clapped it over his flat, ill-kempt black hair. It was with a voluptuous thrill that this creature who knew himself for a part of the scum that had been cast to the surface of the revolutionary cauldron, savoured an office which enabled him figuratively to set his heel upon the proud neck of this delicately nurtured daughter of a hundred kings—those kings who filled him with loathing because he could not rid himself of the base persuasion that they were beings of a different and superior order of creation.

He leered now at the girl over his spectacles. But her attention was again upon her brother, whom she had not seen since he had been brought down, three months ago, from that room on the third floor of the tower, to be placed in the care of Simon. She had taken a step towards him, and had seemed about to address him. Then she had checked, deterred and bewildered by the subtle change she detected in him, and by his very attitude.

He was swinging his legs again, not buoyantly as before; but petulantly, his expression now sullen and morose. From the depths of his infant soul there arose, as if evoked by her candid glance, a vague consciousness of guilt for which she might call him to account. Hence came an indefinable resentment of the presence of this sister whom he loved. She might have broken through that barrier had not the harsh voice of Pache suddenly commanded her attention.

"Thérèse Capet, attend to me if you please."

She stiffened at the insulting form of address; but since to protest would be to derogate, it was in silence that she squarely faced him, thrusting out her chin.

His interrogatory began. He questioned her closely touching relations held by herself, her mother and her aunt, with two commissioners who, false to their duty, had become parties to an attempt to rescue the Queen, engineered by that intrepid adventurer Jean de Batz. They had been denounced by the then custodian of the Temple, a man named Tison, who was now, himself, a prisoner there, Pache's questions, however, aimed at discovering more than had been admitted by Tison.

To his admonition that she should be careful to speak the truth, her only answer was an indignant stare. Against the rest she entrenched herself in ignorance. Baffled by her calm denials the mayor at last threw himself back in his chair and spoke to the municipal beside him.

"Read the depositions of the little Capet. Perhaps they will revive her memory."

Once or twice whilst Daujou's colourless voice was reading her brother's frank incrimination, not only of those two generous friends, but even of the Queen for her endeavours to seduce them from their duty, she turned bewildered eyes on the boy, to be met by a derisive grin.

"Have you anything to say now?" Pache asked her at the end. "Do you confirm the truth of your brother's testimony?"

Again her grave, reproachful glance sought her brother. It had the effect of increasing his resentment.

"You know that it's true," he exclaimed petulantly. "All true. All the sacred lot of it."

Perhaps what shocked her most was the barrack-room adjective on the young King's lips. The eyes she turned once more upon her questioner were as hard as was her voice.

"I confirm nothing. I have no knowledge of these matters.

"How is that possible since your brother knows them?"

"It may be that his memory is better than mine."

"That's all you have to say, is it, my girl?"

Chaumette moved behind Pache. He came to stand squarely over him.

"Let us pass on. Give me the depositions."

Pache did more. He surrendered his chair and his place at the table to Chaumette.

"There is something much more serious, much more lamentable, much more horrible." Thus the Procurator-Syndic, settling himself into the seat and polishing his spectacles. Slovenly of dress, with his ragged collar, his dirty foulard untidily knotted, his false air of naiveté, this blood-hound of the Commune had something of the air of a village schoolmaster.

He set the spectacles on his nose, cleared his throat noisily, and began to read. There were not more than a dozen lines. But it is to be doubted if any other dozen lines ever penned were packed with so much infamy as these accusations of a mother by her own son, a child of eight.

Chaumette set the document down, and leaned forward, his elbows on the table. "You have heard. You will not pretend of these, too, that they are matters outside your knowledge. Living all closely together as you did up there, you must be aware of them. Do you acknowledge it?"

She was bewildered. "Acknowledge? But acknowledge what?"

"The truth, of course. What I have just read to you."

"But I do not understand what you have read." The utter candour of her eyes made it impossible to suppose that the impatience in her voice was histrionic.

"You must make it plainer," said Hébert. "What the devil is the good of veiling things? Let us have it frankly. We live in frank times."

The Procurator-Syndic was indignantly distressed.

"By God! Is it not enough that I must soil my lips with allusions to such turpitudes, without shaming me into discarding all pudicity? However, since you play the innocent with me, my girl, I suppose that I must master repugnance and come down to plain terms."

But even when he had done so, the pure innocence of Madame Royale remained for some moments unenlightened. At last, however, the full horror and bestiality of his meaning burst upon her mind. A flush arose and deepened in her softly rounded face from neck to brow. Chaumette might now relish the conviction that insult had pierced her panoply. That flaming countenance, that trembling lip, the tears that suddenly filled her eyes were to him so many welcome signs that at last he had seared her disdainful insensibility.

"You do not answer," he complained, and by the words spurred her into a royal passion. She stepped forward. The tears fell away from eyes that were now aflash.

David nudged his pupil. "Seize that! Quick! Thus, at three-quarters, as you see her."

La Salle plied his pencil, but ineffectively and merely because it was easier to obey than to explain to David that he was neither an animal nor a machine. Meanwhile the girl's voice rang out.

"Answer, do you say? Do you dare to expect it? What answer can there be to lies so foul, to invention so shameful, so vile, so horrible?"

"Yes, yes," said Chaumette. "Foul and vile and horrible, we agree. I am shamed in mentioning these things. But inventions? If so, they are not ours. The words I have read are your brother's; the matter of them is, I think, beyond the invention of a child of eight."

"My brother's!" That was indeed something momentarily overlooked. The reminder suddenly checked her. She turned to him, sitting there flushed and sullen, observing her furtively, like a dog that fears the whip, conscious of misbehaviour even without understanding the nature of it.

"What infamy!" she cried. "These lies cannot be yours."

He rocked himself on the sofa, his air mutinous as before.

"Yes. It's true." Simon leaned over him, encouragingly, to pat his shoulder. "You know that it is all true."

There was the sound of her fiercely indrawn breath. "Wretch! You don't know what you are saying."

"Oh yes, I do. I know what I am saying, and I know that it's true. So do you."

"He can't! He can't know." She had swung again to face her torturers. Piteously her eyes looked from one to another of the eight men within the sweep of her glance. But all save two were either cold or mocking, and the two—David and La Salle—did not meet her anguished look. Both heads were bent; David's over his writing, for he had been setting down her words, La Salle's over a portrait that he was merely pretending to sketch.

Chaumette looked at Hébert for guidance. Hébert thrust out a nether lip, and shrugged. "She is obstinate, of course. No use wasting time."

"Very well." Chaumette took the written sheet from Daujou. He beckoned Madame Royale forward, dipped a pen, and proffered it. "Sign there, if you please."

She looked at him, dubiously, suspiciously. Then she scanned the document, assured herself that it contained no more than the questions put to her and her replies, and in silence she signed it.

Daujou rose to reconduct her, and at the same moment, as she stood back from the table, the little King, seeing her about to depart, slipped down from the sofa and sidled timidly up to her. He loved her he had missed her sorely these three months, almost as sorely as he had missed his mother, and more than he had missed Aunt Babet. He was lonely and hungry for affection. Simon and his wife were gruffly kind to him, and habit by now had inured him to their coarse ways. Similarly, now that he had grown accustomed to it, he was no longer resentful when the men of the Temple Guard tossed him from one to another, blew tobacco smoke in his face, and called him Charles. Indeed, he had come to enjoy himself amongst them, playing the man amongst men, drinking sweetened brandy; learning the language of the rabble, so rich in blasphemy and indecencies, and the ribald patriotic songs they delighted to teach him. To the child who previously had lived by rigid forms, there was in all this an exciting emancipation. But there was no warmth to replace the love of his mother, his sister and his aunt, from whom three months ago he had been rudely ravished.

The presence of Marie-Thérèse had gradually made him aware of it. The dim consciousness that in some incomprehensible way he had offended her, increased his sense of loneliness and urged him to a caress that should close the gap between them.

Thus, plaintively, he approached her now. She was unaware of it until she felt his fingers seeking to entwine themselves in her own. Startled, she looked down into that upturned face on which there was a piteous little smile. Instantly her expression changed. She snatched her hand away, and recoiled from him.

"Don't touch me! Don't dare to touch me! Don't dare to address me!" she breathed fiercely. "Little monster! Never will I forgive you this. Never!"

He stood abashed, at gaze for a moment. Then a sob shook him, and his eyes filled with tears. At the same instant a hand fell upon his shoulder. The burly Simon, who had followed him from the sofa, spoke in a rough, coaxing voice.

"Come, Charles. Come and sit down with me. They're going to fetch your Aunt Babet."

The child looked through a mist of tears after his sister, as, moving stiffly, her head high, she passed out of the room.

"She was angry with me, Citizen Simon," he sobbed. "Why was she angry with me?"

Simon patted his shoulder to soothe him. "Pay no heed to her. Sacred little aristocrat."

CHAPTER II. JEAN DE BATZ

In the evening of that same October day Jean de Batz, Baron of Armanthieu, sat writing briskly in a cosy, even luxurious, room in the Rue Ménars, behind the Hôtel de Choiseul. He worked by candle-light, the curtains drawn, the fire burning brightly, the room suffused by a fragrance of pine from the fir-cones that were freely mingled with the blazing logs.

This incredible man, the most active worker in the royalist interest in Europe at the time, was of an audacity that no other secret agent has ever paralleled. Almost he seemed to disdain precautions. He rarely troubled to veil his identity, showed himself freely wherever his occasions took him, and came and went with a fire-walker's apparent indifference to the dangers of the ground he trod.

Where others of his kind writhed with frantic but futile violence when the net closed round them, de Batz quietly cut his way through the meshes with golden shears. No man was ever better versed in the arts of bribery, and no man ever employed its corrupting power on so vast a scale. Apart from the gold with which he was well supplied he commanded a supply of the Republic's paper money which was inexhaustible because it came from a printing-press of his own, secretly established at Charenton. These forgeries not only equipped him with unlimited means; they served the further royalist purpose of accelerating the terrible depreciation of the paper currency.

His agents were everywhere. Every transaction of the Committee of Public Safety was known to him at once from Sénar, its secretary, who was in his pay; and, with the exception only of the Revolutionary Tribunal itself, there was not a government department some of whose officials were not bribed to serve him. If success had not waited upon an attempt of his to save the King, and another, later, to deliver the Queen and her children from the Temple, this was due to the malignity of chance, which had presented him with obstacles that could not have been foreseen. That he continued at liberty, practically unsought, although he was known to be the author of these and of other capital offences against the State, is a sufficient proof of the power of the resources with which he hedged himself.

In his person he was a stiffly built man of middle height, good-looking in an imperious way, aggressive of nose and chin and lively of eye. He had cast off coat and waistcoat, and he sat now in frilled shirt and black satin small-clothes, his lustrous black hair as carefully queued as in the days before the coming of sansculottism.

He wrote diligently, with a glance ever and anon at the ormolu timepiece on the mantelshelf, until he was interrupted by the sounds he expected and his elderly servant, Tissot, ushered in the Citizen La Salle.

De Batz sat half round in his chair, so as to face his visitor.

"You are late, Florence."

La Salle loosened the bottle-green riding-coat that had been tightly buttoned to his slenderly vigorous body. He removed his conical hat and shook out the lustrous black hair which he wore long, en oreilles de chien.

"It was a long affair, and I didn't stay to the end. David couldn't wait. The Convention is discussing the Law of Suspects tonight, and our Lycurgus must be in his place. Being at the Temple only by his favour and as his acolyte, I had to depart with him, just before Madame Elizabeth was examined by those muck-rakes."

He was by habit slow of utterance, with a drawl that brought a sneering, half humorous note into his most sober speech. It went well with the frank boldness of his pallid face and with the strong mouth, cast in lines of bitterness which laughter merely emphasized.

"What happened?" asked de Batz.

"Conceive the worst and you will still not have plumbed the depths of the ordurous invention of these gentlemen." He rendered in disgust an account of what he had witnessed at the Temple. "The boy did not know what he was saying. It was a lesson learnt by heart, and his wits were fuddled; a consequential, self-assertive little braggart, playing the man. Before they've done with him, those scoundrels will have gangrened his soul. And then the girl. When their filthy hands rent the veil of her chaste innocence she suffered one of those shocks that change a whole nature. In her anguish she was vixenish to that unhappy boy. It was all horrible. To see children so used!" He pulled his sketch-book from his pocket. "Perhaps emotion for once lent me the vision that David says I lack." He laid the open book before de Batz. "What does that tell you?"

But the Baron, deeply stirred, had no eyes for La Salle's drawing.

"This foulness is Hébert's. He must make sure that the Queen does not cheat the guillotine."

"Isn't it enough to murder her, without bespattering her with their mud? Is God asleep?"

"God? What has God to do with it?" There was a tragic scorn in the Baron's muted voice. "The worst insult ever offered God was the assertion that He made man in His Own Image. Man! Malicious, greedy, hypocritical man, vulnerable to evil at every point. Realize the truth now, whilst you are young, Florence, for it will save you from many errors: men are not good."

His eyes fell, at last, to the sketch, and his attention was instantly caught. He shook his head over it. "A tragic picture. Poor child!"

La Salle almost forgot the tragedy in pride of his art's presentation of it. He cited David's commendation of the power of the drawing, pointing out the telling lines, as if by comparison the sufferings it mirrored were of small account. He wasted breath; for to de Batz all that mattered was the message of the portrait, and not the terms in which that message was conveyed.

That pathetic picture of the sweet, boyish face half veiled in a sly leer moved him fiercely.

He spoke suddenly, on a gust of passion.

"God helping me, whatever the cost, if I have to tear down the Temple walls with my hands, I'll have that child out of it. Florence, I shall depend upon your help."

La Salle's eyes widened. He made a dubious lip. "It will be difficult."

"And dangerous; all things worth doing are one or the other, and often both. But nothing was ever more worth doing. Can I count on you? You know the place. You have been there."

La Salle possessed audacity in plenty, but no rashness. He was cold, logical and unsentimental. As one of the Baron's chief agents, he had done daring and skilful work. To enable him to do it this pupil and associate of the ultra-republican David postured before the world as an advanced and active revolutionary. He was ostentatiously a member of the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, and he had won election to the Council of the Commune as one of the representatives of the section in which he dwelt. Thus he watched events at their source. Thus, in quest of information, he had been able to persuade David to take him that day to the Temple, on a pretext of making sketches that might be of some national importance.

The present proposal, however, seemed not only desperately hazardous, but foredoomed. He hesitated, his black brows contracted.

"I am ready for anything short of the impossible."

"Good. Between us we'll make this possible."

They discussed it further over dinner: for La Salle stayed to dine with de Batz, at a table that was generously spread, as were the tables of all who could afford the unconscionable prices to which food had soared. Scarcity and starvation were for the unfortunate populace, whom the revolutionists, the ideologues and the self-seekers had gulled with promises of wealth for all. There was, of course, for the indigent a dole, that usual concomitant of national decay. It was to be earned by attending sectional meetings. But it amounted to only forty sous a week, and what relief could be obtained from this when bread stood at thirty francs a pound and the bottle of wine that had cost eight sous in the days of tyranny could not be bought for less than twenty francs? The restaurants of the Palais Royal did a brisk trade; the theatres and gaming-houses were well patronized; the men who had made the revolution grew wealthy, and feasted; but the people for whose deliverance it had been made, sank under the rule of these despots from the gutter, to depths of wretchedness unknown in the days of the despots on the throne, and in this state they would continue for as long as credulity tightened the bandage over their eyes.

It was to this that de Batz alluded when he said: "Until I succeed, these wretched dupes, their heads stuffed with cant, their bellies empty, will continue to make sanity impossible."

"Which reminds me," said La Salle, "that I have not the price of tomorrow's dinner."

"That is the normal state in which you visit me."

"Oh, it is not only when I visit you. I am practically without resources. My boots leak, my—"

The Gascon interrupted him. "You had a thousand francs from me a week ago."

"And what's a thousand francs? Or don't you keep a watch on the depreciation of the assignat? A thousand francs today is less than the value of a gold louis. Besides," he drawled, "isn't it your faith that the more of this paper of yours is put into circulation, the sooner the government will be embarrassed?"

"You're always specious. But I'm not thinking of the money only." Gravely his piercing eyes were levelled upon La Salle's baffling countenance. "I sometimes wonder whether you work for the cause or for the money that you get from me?"

La Salle was moved to smile. "The foolishness of that unnecessary question! I work for both. That should be manifest. Without your money how am I to live, since the revolution took all that I had, even to my expectations when it guillotined my uncle and confiscated his property. Count me venal if you choose. It should be enough to justify confidence. I must work for the cause of monarchy because in the restoration of the monarchy lies my only hope of the restoration of my property and also because failing that I shall have to be a painter, although David says that I lack the deeper vision that makes the artist. In anarchical society there is no living for a painter, unless, like Jacques Louis David, he can design its pageants. So let my obvious interestedness, present and future, dispel mistrust of me where my less obvious virtues fail to do so."

"Faith, you're frank. And hard. Oddly hard for one so young."

"We age quickly, we who live in this hotbed of decay; and we harden. We are not even ashamed to become escrocs and ask for money, as I do. What the devil is the purpose of pride, Jean, when your boots leak?"

To mend them the Baron gave him that night not a bundle of forged notes, but a handful of genuine gold louis. He was cynically frank about it.

"You have suddenly become too valuable to be risked, Florence; and there are risks in false assignats, even when they're as good as mine. There's a boy to be rescued from the Temple, and you are better fitted for the task than you may suppose. As you've realized, to save a king for restoration to his throne is for you the surest way of becoming a Court painter."

"Always provided that I don't meanwhile leave my head in Charlot's basket." La Salle pocketed the gold. "It's as well to look at both sides of a medal. Let me know what's to be done as soon as you've decided."

That decision, however—the evolving of a plan—took de Batz three months to reach. In the meantime the unhappy Queen, to whose other crimes had been added the damning charges of which her own son was made the unwitting author, had ridden to the Place de la Révolution in the tumbril, and David, from a window in the Rue St Honoré, had done in a few masterly strokes that swift, terrible, heartless sketch of her which all the world knows to-day. He displayed it in his atélier, in the northern pavilion of the Louvre, and to La Salle in particular offered its virtuosity as a model.

La Salle was still working on a portrait of Louis XVII from the three sketches he had made at the Temple, and he achieved in the end a picture which closely resembled the portrait Kucharsky had painted some eighteen months earlier. David condemned it as mere competent craftsmanship, which may have been unduly harsh, for the likeness was of a remarkable fidelity. To please the master, La Salle tried again, on a larger canvas, and was still more severely damned as academic.

David missed the leer, the slyness which in one of La Salle's sketches had so delighted his warped soul. But in the portraits not all the master's vitriolic scorn could bring his pupil to reproduce the evil truculence of which the boy's face had shown that momentary glimpse. La Salle tried yet again, this time on a reduced scale, producing what was scarcely more than a miniature. In all he worked on that one subject for the best part of three months, until he knew every line and plane so well that he swore he could paint the little King's portrait with bandaged eyes.

And then one day he was seized by the humour of it that whilst all about him the world was in convulsions, with the enemy legions on the frontier and the guillotine reaping a daily harvest just beyond the Tuileries Gardens, he should be bothering about a painted face, and his master about railing at his shortcomings.

That was when the call to action reached him at last from de Batz.

CHAPTER III. JOSEPH FOUCHÉ

It followed from this collaboration between de Batz and La Salle that one day early in Nivôse of the Year Two of the new Era of Liberty—which is to say towards the end of December of 1793 of the obsolete Christian Era—the young art student climbed to the third floor of a dingy house in the Rue St Honoré. Of the young woman with the comely, careworn face who opened a door to his knock, he inquired for the Citizen-Representative Joseph Fouché.

It had happened that at the very moment when de Batz reached the decision that Chaumette was the man upon whom to commence the intended operations, Joseph Fouché had suddenly returned from a republicanizing mission in the Nivernais. He had come to Paris so as to defend himself from a suspicion of moderation bruited against him by Robespierre.

This unexpected return and the circumstances of it had brought de Batz to the opinion that Fouché would better serve their aims. He had watched this man's career, and had closely informed himself of his history.

Educated by the Oratorians for a professorship, Fouché had for seven years exercised that calling in Oratorian institutions. He had taught mathematics at Niort and logic at Vendôme, and in 1783 at Arras he had held the chair for physics, to which thereafter he assiduously devoted himself. A passionate student of aerostatics, he had in 1791 made a balloon ascent at Nantes, which had thrilled the inhabitants with wonder and terror. There in '92, he had married, thus abandoning all notion of the priesthood, of which he had already received the minor, revocable orders. At the same time abandoning pedagogy for politics, he had won election to the Convention as the representative of the Lower Loire. He was, de Batz informed La Salle, the very prince of opportunists, a man without convictions, always the servant of circumstances, and likely always to be on the winning side, since his immense intellect and alertness should always enable him to foresee it. Whilst men had been leniently disposed towards the late King, Fouché had offered unanswerable arguments of leniency; when the main body of opinion swung round, Fouché discovered reasons that left him no choice but to vote the King's death. His mission in the West had been begun with unparalleled ruthlessness and had so continued for as long as he saw in ruthlessness the key to advancement. When his lucid mind, clear of the fanaticism, the brutality, the cowardice that clouded so many revolutionary spirits, perceived the first signs that the nation was becoming nauseated with slaughter, he adopted moderation. So, whilst he lighted no more fires and shed no more blood, to a government which—less quick to perceive the change in public feeling—still desired a policy of ruthlessness, his reports continued to be written in blood and fire.

Robespierre, however, was not easily duped, and Robespierre watched him closely and jealously, as he watched any man who showed signs of ascendancy; for Fouché's activities had already made him famous. His intellectual strength inspiring confidence, an ever increasing party was forming about him, in which Anaxagoras Chaumette—himself an idol of the rabble—was a leading spirit.

Not only did Robespierre perceive in Fouché a potential rival to be destroyed, but there were other more personal reasons for this rancour. In Arras, during his professorship, before the revolution, a friendship had been established between the lawyer and the Oratorian. Fouché had lent him money. And it was almost as hard for Robespierre to forgive this as the fact that Fouché had left Arras without remembering to marry Robespierre's sister. He was suspected of having seduced her. It was probably an unjust suspicion, for Fouché, intellectually superior to any such thing as a moral sense, was yet by nature of the singular austerity that goes with such cold minds.

Lastly, the sometime Oratorian, now a flagrant atheist, accounted it within his mission to dechristianize the province of his commissionership. In collaboration with Chaumette, he had invented the Goddess of Reason and the ceremonials of that cult, mummeries which were repugnant to Robespierre the Deist.

It was Chaumette who had sent word to Fouché of the clouds out of which a thunderbolt might suddenly be launched upon his head, and Fouché had posted straight to Paris so as to confront his critics.

He had not only answered them, he had crushed them, temporarily at least, under specious arguments presented with the turgid oratory which they understood. And he brought more than arguments. He piled upon the floor of the Convention great stacks of gold and of silver: crosses, chalices, pattens, ciboria, candlesticks and the like, the spoils of the churches of the Vilest, and such baubles as the ducal crown of the house of Mazarin. All this, he announced, he had assembled so that it might be melted down to buy boots and bread for those who fought the battles of the nation.

"That is our man," de Batz had told La Salle. "He is in a situation of danger and difficulty, as he knows. Whilst he perceives the change that must come and is aware of the peril of waiting too long before declaring himself, yet he perceives, too, the danger of a premature declaration. Meanwhile, all that such a man can do is to watch and to arm. He will refuse no weapon that presents itself, and I trust to his acuteness to value the power of the weapon that we offer."

And so La Salle had climbed those stairs in the Rue St Honoré, and had been admitted to the single shabby room that the pro-consul occupied; for the arched alcove into which the bed was thrust could hardly be counted as a separate chamber. Nevertheless, Fouché's wife attempted to make it so count when she retired into it and pulled a tattered screen across the opening.

La Salle might then have supposed himself alone with Fouché, but for the fretful crying, the coughs and gasps of the ailing child the citoyenne could be heard endeavouring to soothe.

The pro-consul had risen from a seat by one of the two grimy windows that overlooked the street. He had been writing in a note-book, which was now closed upon his forefinger. He stood waiting, a tall, very thin, delicate man, reddish of hair. His shaven face, long, narrow and well featured, would not have been unattractive had it been less worn and pale. It was the face of a man much older than the three-and-thirty years the ex-professor counted. In the glance of the pale eyes, low-lidded and sleepy-looking, there was something sinister and chilling, whilst the mouth, thin and straight, informed the intelligent that here was a man whom it would be difficult to win by sentiment.

"You wish to see me, citizen?" His manner was coldly courteous, his voice thin. He suffered from the handicap in a man of State who must also be an orator, of a weak throat, and he had not yet recovered from the strain he had yesterday put upon it in the tribune of the Convention.

La Salle, a little disconcerted by the unexpected sordidness of the surroundings in which he discovered this great man, made a quick recovery, bowed hat in hand, and delivered himself of the well-considered opening.

"It was my good fortune to hear you yesterday in the Convention, and I hasten to pay my homage to your pure republicanism, and to express what all thoughtful men must feel—our comfort in the knowledge that we possess so stout a champion to do battle with the liberticides."

Fouché considered him gravely for a moment. Then:

"It is good of you, citizen," he said, "to climb three pairs of stairs so as to tell me this." There was a bitter-sweetness of suspicion in the tone.

La Salle's smile was apologetic. "I have yet another motive."

"It had occurred to me."

"I am a painter, citizen-representative, a student still, but one who hopes to exhibit in this year's Salon, and the hope would be likelier of fulfilment if my subject were of interest in itself. I trust that you discover nothing unworthy in my seeking this adventitious aid."

The pallid face of the man who was never known to miss an adventitious aid to the attainment of any aspiration, displayed a smile that was like wintry sunshine on a frozen pool. "No, no. But why come to me? I know nothing, I fear, of art. My leisures, like my labours, have been given all to science."

"But it is your portrait I desire to paint, citizen-representative." He pulled a sketch-book from one pocket, a pencil from another. "If you would permit me as a preliminary to make a drawing...The reverence, citizen, in which I hold your idealism would inspire me to—"

"Yes, yes. I know all that. I am not, I hope, a man to refuse what is so easily granted. But this will take time, and I am leaving Paris again at once. I return to my duty in the West." He drew forth his watch. "I am afraid we must postpone this affair of yours."

La Salle's face reflected his dismay. "It will take so little time. I work so quickly. Just a preliminary drawing and some notes, from which I could prepare my canvas against your next visit to Paris."

The dull cold eyes were watching him. "But if you work so quickly what would be gained?" And he went on: "You are a student, you say. With whom do you study?"

"With Louis David."

"Ah! A great painter. In the classical tradition, they tell me." His manner relented. A bony, translucent hand, very long and prehensile in the fingers, waved the young man to one of the only two deal chairs in the room. "Sit down. I can give you half an hour, or a little longer, if that will serve."

"Oh, excellently, excellently! If you will sit there, citizen, your profile to the light. So. Now, if you will turn a little towards the window. Not quite so much. There. That is capital."

His pencil worked briskly, and for some moments the task completely absorbed the artist. But when the main lines were down, enough to make a show, he ventured, whilst still drawing, upon conversation.

"It grieves me, as it must grieve every patriot, citizen, to hear that you are not to remain in Paris. You are wanted here. To combat the corruption that is about."

Fouché did not answer. He sat as if wrapped in thought. After a moment's concentration on his sketch, La Salle resumed.

"There are queer stories. One hears things in the atéliers and in the cafés. They may not be true, but they make a man uneasy."

"What sort of things?" asked the dry, thin voice.

"Some that it is hardly safe to repeat. And some...For instance, the latest rumour is of a plot to kidnap the little Capet."

He expected a question that would open the way for him. But Fouché did not come to cues. "That is as inevitable as its failure," he said. "It has been tried. No need for alarm as long as Chaumette has charge of the Temple."

"I hope not. Indeed, I hope not. I am relieved to hear you say so." La Salle worked on, his wits seeking another line of attack. "Yet considering the temptations one is rendered uneasy."

"What exactly are the temptations?"

This was better. It supplied the opening needed. "The price that the enemies of France would pay for the possession of the person of the so-called Louis XVII."

"That could not tempt a patriot. He is not athirst for gold. His needs are small: iron, bread and an income of forty crowns."

La Salle sighed. He stole a glance round the sordid room.

"If all patriots were as you, citizen, there would be no grounds for uneasiness."

"All patriots who are not like me are not patriots," said Fouché. "But if you are seriously perturbed, you should see the Citizen Chaumette. He is responsible for the Temple and its prisoners." He drew forth his watch again. "I hope that your sketch is finished. My time is hardly my own."

Then La Salle understood that his aims were suspected, and that without even troubling to ascertain their nature, Fouché was purposely making it impossible for him to pursue them. He accepted a defeat which no insistence could avert. With a word of apology he worked on in silence for some moments.

Fouché rose with him when it was done. "May I see your drawing?"

La Salle proffered the book. The sleepy eyes considered the page.

"Yes," was the odd comment, "you are an artist." He turned aside to call. "Bonne! Come and see this picture of me."

She came, a gentle, timid woman, and a flicker of interest lighted her dark, careworn eyes as she looked at the portrait. It pleased and was flattering, because La Salle, whilst faithfully recording the comely lines of the countenance, had completely missed—as David was scornfully to point out to him to-morrow—the elusive repellent force contained in them.

"It is beautiful," she exclaimed. "So like you, Joseph, that it almost speaks."

"If it does that, it is not like me at all."

"He jests, citizen. He is like that," she reassured La Salle, her eyes on his grave, attentive face.

"I had hoped to paint a portrait, citoyenne. But that must wait until we meet again."

Thus maintaining the pretence, and with many compliments, he took his leave.

"A charming young man," said Bonne-Jeanne.

"Oh, charming," her husband agreed. "Charm is a spy's best stock-in-trade."

"A spy?" There was real fear in her glance. "Was he a spy?"

"It is at least probable. A pupil of Louis David's. Louis David a worshipper of Robespierre, devoted to him body and soul. Robespierre, spreading the ground with snares for me. There seems to be a chain. And he talked to me of plots, as I expected he would, when I allowed him to remain. We had better be making our packages, my girl, and get back to the West."

The child in the cot grew fretful. Care deepened in Bonne-Jeanne's face. "Couldn't we wait for two or three days? Little Nièvre is so ill."

Pain contracted his eyes. He set an arm affectionately about her shoulders. "For little Nièvre, too, it will be better that we get away from these drinkers of blood. Wild beasts are cruel only because of their stupidity and fear. So it is with men. Only the stupid and the craven are cruel."

Yet in Lyons, when he got there, he wrote his name in fire and blood, so that he made it infamous for all time. And he did it with a full consciousness of what he did; practising cruelty not because he was either stupid or cowardly, but because, so as to hold his position until he could make of it a stepping-stone to mastery, he must not in the present temper of the government be moderate.

CHAPTER IV. THE SEDUCTION OF CHAUMETTE

"You should see the Citizen Chaumette," Fouché had said to La Salle, and as if acting on that advice it was Chaumette, after all, whom he sought upon the morrow.

Loitering in the hall of the Tuileries for the purpose of waylaying the Procurator-Syndic of the Commune, the young painter was himself hailed by the great man and drawn out of the crowd.

"What's this you were telling Fouché of a plot to kidnap the little Capet?"

"Oh, that! Probably an idle rumour."

They came out on to the steps of the palace.

The December day, although sunny, was cold, and perhaps on this account the attendance of idlers in the courtyard was less than usual. There were a few odd groups, chiefly of the out-of-work starvelings so plentifully produced by the attempt to build Utopia. Women preponderated—noisy, aggressive harridans who shared the general illusion of emancipation which had made of every fishwife a politician. Two or three newspaper-hawkers were shouting the contents of their sheets, announcing the daily discovery of a plot against the Republic by either Coburg or the perfidious Pitt. Beyond the gateway, in the Carrousel, a swarm of beggars whined, some flaunting their sores or their crippled limbs, so as to move compassion. Their presence annoyed Chaumette. He denounced them to his companion as being assembled and paraded by aristocrat intriguers, so as to discredit the Republic by creating an illusion of misery.

In the Rue St Nicaise they had some difficulty in getting through a mob of angry, raucous women that besieged a bread-shop and fiercely resisted the injunctions, and even the pikes, of four sectionary officers who strove to range them into an orderly queue. La Salle inquired ironically, was this another illusion resulting from reactionary juggling?

"The women," Chaumette answered him, missing the irony, "are getting out of hand. They have been encouraged to play a part for which they are not fitted. Their place is in the home, bearing children to defend the fatherland. The law will have to see to it. But this aristocrat plot of which you were speaking..."

"I spoke of no aristocrat plot. I don't think aristocrats are concerned in it."

"You don't suggest that patriots are conspiring to steal the boy? What could they do with him?"

"Do you really ask me that?" It was to be presumed that La Salle's laugh was at the simplicity of Chaumette. "Have you thought, my friend, what his imperial Austrian uncle might be willing to pay for the boy's person? Certainly not less than a million, probably five millions, possibly ten millions, and in Austrian gold, Chaumette, not in assignats. There's a short cut to affluence for anyone who desires affluence, to power, perhaps, for anyone who desires power. For if the forces of reaction should yet prevail and the Republic be engulfed, what would be the position of the preserver of the King?"

The sudden gravity of Chaumette's peasant face provoked fresh laughter in La Salle. "You begin to see that there would be motive enough. Look to your prisoner, Chaumette. Look to your prisoner."

"So I will, name of God! You shall tell me more. You shall give evidence of this before the Committee of Public Safety."

"I have no evidence. That is, I do not know enough to denounce anyone. I have heard several named. But it is all so vague. It would be terrible to bring suspicion on any man by naming him in these circumstances."

"It would be more terrible to leave the Republic exposed to peril. Better even that some innocent heads should fall." Chaumette was patriotically intransigent. "You shall come before the Committee and name those you have heard mentioned."

La Salle shook his head. "In that case I should have to begin by naming you."

"Me?" Chaumette sucked in his breath. "Name of God! Me?" He stood still. They had turned the corner, and were standing before the portals of the Opera. A chestnut-seller approached, crying her wares. She removed the rusty shawl swathing the pan she bore in the crook of her arm, and proffered the boiled fruit. Chaumette in that moment of irritation dismissed her with peremptory contempt, and so provoked a storm of abuse in the course of which, and in spite of his sash of office, she cursed him for a pig of an aristocrat.

Chaumette dragged his companion on, out of range of her invective.

"These women! Name of God, these women!" He halted again. "You were saying that I am named by these calumniators." He was livid.

"Less unreasonably than others."

"How? What do you mean by that?"

"The Temple is the prison of the Commune. You are the Procurator-Syndic of the Commune, the only man in Paris with free, unchallenged access to the Temple at all hours. In your case, at least, there is the opportunity. Does it not follow, once the silly rumour is afoot it must attach itself to the one man who is in a position to perform the thing?"