M. des Amis gripped him by the shoulders, and looked into his face.
“Is this true, my friend?” he asked.
“Not a word of it,” said Andre-Louis, wrecking his chances on an irresistible impulse to say the unexpected. But he didn’t wreck them. M. des Amis burst into laughter; and having laughed his fill, confessed himself charmed by his applicant’s fundamental honesty.
“Take off your coat,” he said, “and let us see what you can do. Nature, at least, designed you for a swordsman. You are light, active, and supple, with a good length of arm, and you seem intelligent. I may make something of you, teach you enough for my purpose, which is that you should give the elements of the art to new pupils before I take them in hand to finish them. Let us try. Take that mask and foil, and come over here.”
He led him to the end of the room, where the bare floor was scored with lines of chalk to guide the beginner in the management of his feet.
At the end of a ten minutes’ bout, M. des Amis offered him the situation, and explained it. In addition to imparting the rudiments of the art to beginners, he was to brush out the fencing-room every morning, keep the foils furbished, assist the gentlemen who came for lessons to dress and undress, and make himself generally useful. His wages for the present were to be forty livres a month, and he might sleep in an alcove behind the fencing-room if he had no other lodging.
The position, you see, had its humiliations. But, if Andre-Louis would hope to dine, he must begin by eating his pride as an hors d’oeuvre.
“And so,” he said, controlling a grimace, “the robe yields not only to the sword, but to the broom as well. Be it so. I stay.”
It is characteristic of him that, having made that choice, he should have thrown himself into the work with enthusiasm. It was ever his way to do whatever he did with all the resources of his mind and energies of his body. When he was not instructing very young gentlemen in the elements of the art, showing them the elaborate and intricate salute — which with a few days’ hard practice he had mastered to perfection — and the eight guards, he was himself hard at work on those same guards, exercising eye, wrist, and knees.
Perceiving his enthusiasm, and seeing the obvious possibilities it opened out of turning him into a really effective assistant, M. des Amis presently took him more seriously in hand.
“Your application and zeal, my friend, are deserving of more than forty livres a month,” the master informed him at the end of a week. “For the present, however, I will make up what else I consider due to you by imparting to you secrets of this noble art. Your future depends upon how you profit by your exceptional good fortune in receiving instruction from me.”
Thereafter every morning before the opening of the academy, the master would fence for half an hour with his new assistant. Under this really excellent tuition Andre-Louis improved at a rate that both astounded and flattered M. des Amis. He would have been less flattered and more astounded had he known that at least half the secret of Andre-Louis’ amazing progress lay in the fact that he was devouring the contents of the master’s library, which was made up of a dozen or so treatises on fencing by such great masters as La Bessiere, Danet, and the syndic of the King’s Academy, Augustin Rousseau. To M. des Amis, whose swordsmanship was all based on practice and not at all on theory, who was indeed no theorist or student in any sense, that little library was merely a suitable adjunct to a fencing-academy, a proper piece of decorative furniture. The books themselves meant nothing to him in any other sense. He had not the type of mind that could have read them with profit nor could he understand that another should do so. Andre-Louis, on the contrary, a man with the habit of study, with the acquired faculty of learning from books, read those works with enormous profit, kept their precepts in mind, critically set off those of one master against those of another, and made for himself a choice which he proceeded to put into practice.
At the end of a month it suddenly dawned upon M. des Amis that his assistant had developed into a fencer of very considerable force, a man in a bout with whom it became necessary to exert himself if he were to escape defeat.
“I said from the first,” he told him one day, “that Nature designed you for a swordsman. See how justified I was, and see also how well I have known how to mould the material with which Nature has equipped you.”
“To the master be the glory,” said Andre-Louis.
His relations with M. des Amis had meanwhile become of the friendliest, and he was now beginning to receive from him other pupils than mere beginners. In fact Andre-Louis was becoming an assistant in a much fuller sense of the word. M. des Amis, a chivalrous, open-handed fellow, far from taking advantage of what he had guessed to be the young man’s difficulties, rewarded his zeal by increasing his wages to four louis a month.
From the earnest and thoughtful study of the theories of others, it followed now — as not uncommonly happens — that Andre-Louis came to develop theories of his own. He lay one June morning on his little truckle bed in the alcove behind the academy, considering a passage that he had read last night in Danet on double and triple feints. It had seemed to him when reading it that Danet had stopped short on the threshold of a great discovery in the art of fencing. Essentially a theorist, Andre-Louis perceived the theory suggested, which Danet himself in suggesting it had not perceived. He lay now on his back, surveying the cracks in the ceiling and considering this matter further with the lucidity that early morning often brings to an acute intelligence. You are to remember that for close upon two months now the sword had been Andre-Louis’ daily exercise and almost hourly thought. Protracted concentration upon the subject was giving him an extraordinary penetration of vision. Swordsmanship as he learnt and taught and saw it daily practised consisted of a series of attacks and parries, a series of disengages from one line into another. But always a limited series. A half-dozen disengages on either side was, strictly speaking, usually as far as any engagement went. Then one recommenced. But even so, these disengages were fortuitous. What if from first to last they should be calculated?
That was part of the thought — one of the two legs on which his theory was to stand; the other was: what would happen if one so elaborated Danet’s ideas on the triple feint as to merge them into a series of actual calculated disengages to culminate at the fourth or fifth or even sixth disengage? That is to say, if one were to make a series of attacks inviting ripostes again to be countered, each of which was not intended to go home, but simply to play the opponent’s blade into a line that must open him ultimately, and as predetermined, for an irresistible lunge. Each counter of the opponent’s would have to be preconsidered in this widening of his guard, a widening so gradual that he should himself be unconscious of it, and throughout intent upon getting home his own point on one of those counters.
Andre-Louis had been in his time a chess-player of some force, and at chess he had excelled by virtue of his capacity for thinking ahead. That virtue applied to fencing should all but revolutionize the art. It was so applied already, of course, but only in an elementary and very limited fashion, in mere feints, single, double, or triple. But even the triple feint should be a clumsy device compared with this method upon which he theorized.
He considered further, and the conviction grew that he held the key of a discovery. He was impatient to put his theory to the test.
That morning he was given a pupil of some force, against whom usually he was hard put to it to defend himself. Coming on guard, he made up his mind to hit him on the fourth disengage, predetermining the four passes that should lead up to it. They engaged in tierce, and Andre-Louis led the attack by a beat and a straightening of the arm. Came the demi-contre he expected, which he promptly countered by a thrust in quinte; this being countered again, he reentered still lower, and being again correctly parried, as he had calculated, he lunged swirling his point into carte, and got home full upon his opponent’s breast. The ease of it surprised him.
They began again. This time he resolved to go
in on the fifth disengage, and in on that he went with the same ease. Then, complicating the matter further, he decided to try the sixth, and worked out in his mind the combination of the five preliminary engages. Yet again he succeeded as easily as before.
The young gentleman opposed to him laughed with just a tinge of mortification in his voice.
“I am all to pieces this morning,” he said.
“You are not of your usual force,” Andre-Louis politely agreed. And then greatly daring, always to test that theory of his to the uttermost: “So much so,” he added, “that I could almost be sure of hitting you as and when I declare.”
The capable pupil looked at him with a half-sneer. “Ah, that, no,” said he.
“Let us try. On the fourth disengage I shall touch you. Allons! En garde!”
And as he promised, so it happened.
The young gentleman who, hitherto, had held no great opinion of Andre-Louis’ swordsmanship, accounting him well enough for purposes of practice when the master was otherwise engaged, opened wide his eyes. In a burst of mingled generosity and intoxication, Andre-Louis was almost for disclosing his method — a method which a little later was to become a commonplace of the fencing-rooms. Betimes he checked himself. To reveal his secret would be to destroy the prestige that must accrue to him from exercising it.
At noon, the academy being empty, M. des Amis called Andre-Louis to one of the occasional lessons which he still received. And for the first time in all his experience with Andre-Louis, M. des Amis received from him a full hit in the course of the first bout. He laughed, well pleased, like the generous fellow he was.
“Aha! You are improving very fast, my friend.” He still laughed, though not so well pleased, when he was hit in the second bout. After that he settled down to fight in earnest with the result that Andre-Louis was hit three times in succession. The speed and accuracy of the fencing-master when fully exerting himself disconcerted Andre-Louis’ theory, which for want of being exercised in practice still demanded too much consideration.
But that his theory was sound he accounted fully established, and with that, for the moment, he was content. It remained only to perfect by practice the application of it. To this he now devoted himself with the passionate enthusiasm of the discoverer. He confined himself to a half-dozen combinations, which he practised assiduously until each had become almost automatic. And he proved their infallibility upon the best among M. des Amis’ pupils.
Finally, a week or so after that last bout of his with des Amis, the master called him once more to practice.
Hit again in the first bout, the master set himself to exert all his skill against his assistant. But to-day it availed him nothing before Andre-Louis’ impetuous attacks.
After the third hit, M. des Amis stepped back and pulled off his mask.
“What’s this?” he asked. He was pale, and his dark brows were contracted in a frown. Not in years had he been so wounded in his self-love. “Have you been taught a secret botte?”
He had always boasted that he knew too much about the sword to believe any nonsense about secret bottes; but this performance of Andre-Louis’ had shaken his convictions on that score.
“No,” said Andre-Louis. “I have been working hard; and it happens that I fence with my brains.”
“So I perceive. Well, well, I think I have taught you enough, my friend. I have no intention of having an assistant who is superior to myself.”
“Little danger of that,” said Andre-Louis, smiling pleasantly. “You have been fencing hard all morning, and you are tired, whilst I, having done little, am entirely fresh. That is the only secret of my momentary success.”
His tact and the fundamental good-nature of M. des Amis prevented the matter from going farther along the road it was almost threatening to take. And thereafter, when they fenced together, Andre-Louis, who continued daily to perfect his theory into an almost infallible system, saw to it that M. des Amis always scored against him at least two hits for every one of his own. So much he would grant to discretion, but no more. He desired that M. des Amis should be conscious of his strength, without, however, discovering so much of its real extent as would have excited in him an unnecessary degree of jealousy.
And so well did he contrive that whilst he became ever of greater assistance to the master — for his style and general fencing, too, had materially improved — he was also a source of pride to him as the most brilliant of all the pupils that had ever passed through his academy. Never did Andre-Louis disillusion him by revealing the fact that his skill was due far more to M. des Amis’ library and his own mother wit than to any lessons received.
CHAPTER II. QUOS DEUS VULT PERDERE
Once again, precisely as he had done when he joined the Binet troupe, did Andre-Louis now settle down whole-heartedly to the new profession into which necessity had driven him, and in which he found effective concealment from those who might seek him to his hurt. This profession might — although in fact it did not — have brought him to consider himself at last as a man of action. He had not, however, on that account ceased to be a man of thought, and the events of the spring and summer months of that year 1789 in Paris provided him with abundant matter for reflection. He read there in the raw what is perhaps the most amazing page in the history of human development, and in the end he was forced to the conclusion that all his early preconceptions had been at fault, and that it was such exalted, passionate enthusiasts as Vilmorin who had been right.
I suspect him of actually taking pride in the fact that he had been mistaken, complacently attributing his error to the circumstance that he had been, himself, of too sane and logical a mind to gauge the depths of human insanity now revealed.
He watched the growth of hunger, the increasing poverty and distress of Paris during that spring, and assigned it to its proper cause, together with the patience with which the people bore it. The world of France was in a state of hushed, of paralyzed expectancy, waiting for the States General to assemble and for centuries of tyranny to end. And because of this expectancy, industry had come to a standstill, the stream of trade had dwindled to a trickle. Men would not buy or sell until they clearly saw the means by which the genius of the Swiss banker, M. Necker, was to deliver them from this morass. And because of this paralysis of affairs the men of the people were thrown out of work and left to starve with their wives and children.
Looking on, Andre-Louis smiled grimly. So far he was right. The sufferers were ever the proletariat. The men who sought to make this revolution, the electors — here in Paris as elsewhere — were men of substance, notable bourgeois, wealthy traders. And whilst these, despising the canaille, and envying the privileged, talked largely of equality — by which they meant an ascending equality that should confuse themselves with the gentry — the proletariat perished of want in its kennels.
At last with the month of May the deputies arrived, Andre-Louis’ friend Le Chapelier prominent amongst them, and the States General were inaugurated at Versailles. It was then that affairs began to become interesting, then that Andre-Louis began seriously to doubt the soundness of the views he had held hitherto.
When the royal proclamation had gone forth decreeing that the deputies of the Third Estate should number twice as many as those of the other two orders together, Andre-Louis had believed that the preponderance of votes thus assured to the Third Estate rendered inevitable the reforms to which they had pledged themselves.
But he had reckoned without the power of the privileged orders over the proud Austrian queen, and her power over the obese, phlegmatic, irresolute monarch. That the privileged orders should deliver battle in defence of their privileges, Andre-Louis could understand. Man being what he is, and labouring under his curse of acquisitiveness, will never willingly surrender possessions, whether they be justly or unjustly held. But what surprised Andre-Louis was the unutterable crassness of the methods by which the Privileged ranged themselves for battle. They opposed brute force to reason and philosophy, a
nd battalions of foreign mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas were to be impaled on bayonets!
The war between the Privileged and the Court on one side, and the Assembly and the People on the other had begun.
The Third Estate contained itself, and waited; waited with the patience of nature; waited a month whilst, with the paralysis of business now complete, the skeleton hand of famine took a firmer grip of Paris; waited a month whilst Privilege gradually assembled an army in Versailles to intimidate it — an army of fifteen regiments, nine of which were Swiss and German — and mounted a park of artillery before the building in which the deputies sat. But the deputies refused to be intimidated; they refused to see the guns and foreign uniforms; they refused to see anything but the purpose for which they had been brought together by royal proclamation.
Thus until the 10th of June, when that great thinker and metaphysician, the Abbe Sieyes, gave the signal: “It is time,” said he, “to cut the cable.”
And the opportunity came soon, at the very beginning of July. M. du Chatelet, a harsh, haughty disciplinarian, proposed to transfer the eleven French Guards placed under arrest from the military gaol of the Abbaye to the filthy prison of Bicetre reserved for thieves and felons of the lowest order. Word of that intention going forth, the people at last met violence with violence. A mob four thousand strong broke into the Abbaye, and delivered thence not only the eleven guardsmen, but all the other prisoners, with the exception of one whom they discovered to be a thief, and whom they put back again.
That was open revolt at last, and with revolt Privilege knew how to deal. It would strangle this mutinous Paris in the iron grip of the foreign regiments. Measures were quickly concerted. Old Marechal de Broglie, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, imbued with a soldier’s contempt for civilians, conceiving that the sight of a uniform would be enough to restore peace and order, took control with Besenval as his second-in-command. The foreign regiments were stationed in the environs of Paris, regiments whose very names were an irritation to the Parisians, regiments of Reisbach, of Diesbach, of Nassau, Esterhazy, and Roehmer. Reenforcements of Swiss were sent to the Bastille between whose crenels already since the 30th of June were to be seen the menacing mouths of loaded cannon.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 359
