by Eugène Sue
As the evening wore on, however, that last cry of “Long live the Emperor,” became more and more infrequent. The people understood at last that Napoleon, whose return they had acclaimed with such hopefulness, preferred rather to abandon France to the woes which hung over her than to make an appeal to the spirit of Revolution. The Corsican ceased to be the idol of the people. Cursed be the name of Napoleon!
At his post, gun on shoulder, John Lebrenn paced up and down the length of the terrace of the Elysian Garden. He heard the cries of the crowd— “Down with the traitors”— “Down with the Bourbons”— “The Emperor, the Emperor!”— “War to the knife against the invaders!”
At that moment Napoleon, in a round hat and plain citizen’s cloak, turned out of the alley which abutted on the terrace. The dethroned Emperor was walking, in a revery, his hands crossed behind his back. In the dark, and under the trees, he did not notice the sentry until close upon him. When he did, he stopped short, and, falling into his usual habit of questioning those whom he met, he said to Lebrenn, who presented arms:
“Have you been in the service?”
“Yes, Sire,” replied John. The thought flashed through his mind that he had in the same words answered Louis Capet in his prison in the Temple; now he was calling Napoleon “Sire” on the day of his deposition.
“What campaigns were you in? Answer,” commanded Napoleon.
“The campaign of 1794, in the Army of the Rhine and Moselle.”
“Under the Republic! Have you served since?”
“No, Sire; I was married. I served the Republic.”
“What is your profession?”
“I am a cloth merchant.”
“In what quarter?”
“St. Denis Street.”
“What say they of the Emperor among the merchants of St. Denis Street? Answer me without hunting for phrases.”
At that moment a new cry burst from the throng below and reached the ears of Napoleon:
“Down with the Bourbons!”
“Down with the traitors!”
“Arms! Arms! To the frontiers!”
“The Emperor, long live the Emperor!”
“Again?” said Napoleon, shrugging his shoulders; and then to Lebrenn, “Well, what do they say of me in St. Denis Street?”
“The most of the burghers look with repugnance upon a new Restoration; but for the commercial bourgeoisie, the Restoration, if it will only assure peace, means a renewal of business,” replied Lebrenn.
“Always the same, these bourgeois,” muttered Napoleon; “peace, business. Their mouths can shape no other words. Among them never the shadow of national sentiment! And what is the attitude of the people, the workingmen of your quarter?”
“Some are astonished at your inaction, Sire; others are more severe; they arraign your general policies.”
“Have I not always had my hands tied by the Chamber of Deputies, by babblers, lawyers, and rainbow-chasers! They think only of orating, of overwhelming me with their reproaches, instead of aiding me to save the country. They balanced opinions like the Greeks in the lower world, while here the barbarians were at the gates of Paris. They are the wretches!”
“I was at St. Cloud in the days of Brumaire, Sire, when with your grenadiers you drove the Representatives of the people from their seats. Now, when the safety of the fatherland is at stake, why do you not employ the same measures against the deputies who prevent your saving France?”
“The Five Hundred were Terrorists, malcontents, seditionists, assassins,” said Napoleon quickly; “they merited death.”
“I arrived shortly after the session of the Five Hundred. You ran no danger. No poniard was raised against you. The Five Hundred were no malcontents; they defended the law and the Constitution.”
“You are a Jacobin.”
“Yes, Sire; ever since ‘93; and I believe that to-day, as in ‘93, the Republic single-handed could cope with coalized Europe — especially had the Republic your sword!”
Napoleon’s face changed, and he smiled with that inscrutability mingled with grace and good-fellowship which gave him, more than anything else, such influence over the simple-minded. “Ah, ah, Sir Jacobin,” he said, “well for you it is that I find out so late what you are. You have no doubt some influence in your quarter; I would have sent you to rot in Vincennes, my new prison of state, at the bottom of a pit!”
Anew the cries from below broke out: “Down with the Bourbons!” “Arms!” “To the frontiers!” “Long live the Emperor — War to the death against the foreigners!”
“Brave people!” said Napoleon. “They would let themselves still be hewed to pieces for me; and still they bear the weight of imposts, of munitions of war, while my Marshals and all the military chiefs whom I covered with riches betray me. My role is played out. I shall go to America and turn planter, and philosophize on the emptiness of human events! I shall write my campaigns, like Caesar.”
“Sire, you forget France. Place your sword at her service; become again General Bonaparte, as you were in the glorious days of Arcola and Lodi—”
“Sir,” broke in the Emperor impatiently and with emphasis, “when one has been Emperor of the French, he does not step down. To fall, smitten by the thunderbolt, is not debasement. Never shall I consent to become again a simple general.”
An aide-de-camp came up and joined the General. “Sire,” he said, “Colonel Gourgaud awaits your Majesty’s commands.”
“Let him harness the six-horse coach and make his way out through the large gate of the Elysian Garden, to draw the attention of the mob about the palace. I shall take the single-horse carriage and leave by the equerries’ gate. Hold, I have another order for you.”
Napoleon grasped the aide by the arm, addressed him in a low voice, and walked off with him. Soon they both disappeared around the corner of the alley. The night was now black as pitch. Below, the cries of the people ascended again:
“Arms! Arms!”
“To the frontiers!”
“The Emperor, the Emperor! War to the bitter end against the invaders!”
“Your Emperor, O people! is fleeing from you by night,” soliloquized John Lebrenn as he paced his weary round on the terrace. “He flees the duties to which your voice would call him. He might have enshrined his name in a new glory, that would have been pure and bright forever. But fate drives him on to terrible retribution — captivity, perhaps death. And thus will be avenged the coup d’etat of Brumaire, thus his attempts against the liberty of the people. May the same fate fall upon all the monarchs of the world!”
EPILOGUE.
CHAPTER I.
“TO THE BARRICADES!” — 1830.
FIFTEEN YEARS HAVE rolled their course since the second Restoration, accomplished after the Hundred Days. The Bourbon government seems to have set itself the task of making the indignation of the people run over.
Many are the grievances of France against the Bourbons: Provocations, iniquities, barbarisms, the White Terror of 1815; — the provost courts, where the hatred and rancor of the Emigrants sated itself with vengeance; — assassination, organized, blessed, and glorified, in the south; — Trestaillon and other defenders of altar and throne slaying their fellow citizens with impunity; — the Chamber of Deputies unattainable, all its members royalists save one; — the billion francs’ indemnity granted to the Emigrants; — the establishment by the Ultramountainists and the Ultraroyalists of the law of sacrilege and the law of primogeniture; — the impieties of the clergy; — the orgies of the mission fathers.
Military and civil conspiracies sprang up, to protest against the Bourbons with the blood of martyrs. The Carbonarii, a vast secret society, extended its ramifications throughout all France and preserved the traditions of republicanism. The Chamber of Deputies was dissolved, having been guilty of declaring to Charles X through the organ of its majority, in its address to the crown, that harmony no longer existed between the legislative body and the government. The Chamber having been dissolved, the
country in the new elections responded by returning 221 deputies of the opposition which composed the majority of the Assembly. King Charles X, in place of deferring to this manifestation by the country, imagined that, thanks to the successes of the French arms in Algeria, he could successfully put through a coup d’etat; which he attempted, using Minister Polignac as his instrument, and rendering the ordinances of the 26th of July, 1830, which suppressed the liberties of the nation.
During the fifteen years of the Restoration, John Lebrenn had continued his Breton cloth trade in Paris. Monsieur Desmarais, having gone mad upon the second return of the Bourbons, died in isolation. Marik, Lebrenn’s son, had espoused Henory Kerdren, the daughter of a merchant of Vannes, a correspondent of his father’s. One son had been born of the marriage. He was now two years old, and had been given the name of one of the heroes of ancient Gaul, Sacrovir.
The 27th of July, the day after the promulgation of the Polignac decrees, at about eleven in the evening, Madam Lebrenn and her daughter-in-law Henory had closed the shop, and had gone up to their mezzanine floor; there, together in their room, they busied themselves with the preparation of lint, in anticipation of the insurrection which seemed due on the morrow. Marik Lebrenn and Castillon were loading cartridges. Castillon, now at the ripe old age of sixty-three, was white of hair, but still supple and robust, and still plied his ironsmith’s trade. A cradle, in which slept little Sacrovir, the grandson of John Lebrenn, was placed beside Henory. It was a picture of the sweet joys of the family.
“In the presence of the passing events, and especially of those that seem to be preparing,” observed Madam Lebrenn, the same brave, steadfast Charlotte as of yore, “I feel again that grave and almost solemn emotion which I felt in my girlhood, in the grand days of the Revolution. Those were glorious spectacles!”
“A terrible and glorious time, mother,” answered Henory. “Imperishable memories!”
“In the name of a name! We shall fight, Madam Henory!” quoth old Castillon. “These cartridges will not be wasted. Down with Charles X, Polignac, and the whole clique of them! Down with the skull-caps!”
Just then John Lebrenn came up. All rose and ran to meet him. He held out his hand to his wife, and kissed his daughter-in-law Henory on the forehead.
“The delegates of the patriot workingmen of the quarter have not yet come?” he asked.
“No, father,” replied Marik.
“What news have you picked up on your travels, my friend?” asked his wife.
“Good, and bad.”
“Commence with the bad, father,” said Marik.
“The 221 deputies of the opposition lack energy,” began his father; “there is indeed a minority of resolute citizens, Mauguin, Labbey of Pompieres, Dupont from the Eure, Audrey of Puyraveau, Daunou, and some others. But the majority seems paralyzed with fear. Thiers is a coward, Casimir Perier a poltroon. These two wretches pretend that royalty must be given time to repent and to return to the paths of legality. They propose opening negotiations with the monarchy.”
“Death to Thiers, the petty bourgeois! Death to his accomplices. To the lamp-post with the traitors!” cried Castillon, as he filled a shell.
“The same fear, the same lack of confidence on the part of the bourgeoisie as in 1789,” remarked Madam Lebrenn. “To-day, as then, the bourgeoisie is ready to fall at the feet of the King and implore his aid against the revolution.”
“What is James Lafitte’s attitude?” queried Marik. “Does he show himself a man of resolution in the struggle?”
“His civic courage does not fail him. He remains calm and smiling. His establishment is the rendezvous of the Orleanist party, which is making a lot of stir, but takes no determined stand.”
“And Lafayette — is he on the side of the people?” asked Madam Lebrenn in turn.
“He is still the same man as we knew him forty years ago,” her husband replied; “undecided, vacillating, incapable of taking a stand. Lafayette is of all cliques.”
“General Lafayette knows well enough that if Charles X wins in the struggle, his life is in danger,” interjected Madam Lebrenn.
“The General’s courage is above suspicion; but his lack of decision may have disastrous consequences for our cause.”
“His popularity is very great, and he may aspire to be President of the Republic,” pursued Lebrenn’s wife.
“Our friends declared to him to-day that they counted on him for President in case the Republic were proclaimed. He made answer that he had no ambition in that direction, and that he would first have to see how things fell out.”
At that moment Martin, the painter of battles, and Duresnel entered the room. They were both armed with hunting pieces, and carried belts full of cartridges. Both the artist and Duresnel were chiefs in the republican Carbonarii, and had played their part in many a conspiracy upon the return of the Bourbons. Duresnel had spent three years in prison, having been sentenced for press offences, for being proprietor of a liberal newspaper. Martin, compromised in the conspiracy of Belfort, and being condemned to death in John Doe proceedings, took refuge in England, where he lived for four years, returning to France only after the amnesty. Through it all the two men had retained the patriotic ardor of their youth. They were frank republicans, and partisans of the Commune.
“Good even, Madam Lebrenn,” said Martin, setting down his gun. “I see you are pulling lint; a good precaution, for to-morrow, at daybreak, there will be hot work, or I am mistaken. Good evening, Madam Henory; your little Sacrovir will probably hear music to-morrow which will not be as pleasing to his ear as his mother’s songs.”
“It is good that my son become early used to such music, Monsieur Martin,” smiled the young mother. “Perhaps he will have to listen to it often, for I want to make him a good republican, like his father and grandfather.”
“What news do you bring, friends?” asked John Lebrenn.
“I am just from the office of the National,” said Duresnel, “where they were holding a meeting of the opposition journalists. Armand Carrel regards all attempt at revolution as senseless. He will not admit that an undisciplined population can triumph over an army.”
“The people, happily, will not guide themselves by the opinion of this particular journalist,” laughed Martin. “The agitation is spreading in all quarters. A gathering, ordered to evacuate the Place of the Bourse, attacked the troops, shouting ‘Long live the charter! Down with the King! To the lamp-post with the Jesuits and Polignac!’”
“The same scene was reproduced on the Place of Our Lady of Victories, and on St. Denis Boulevard,” said Duresnel.
“And they are getting ready for the same struggle in the St. Honoré quarter,” Martin continued. “To-morrow at dawn Paris will bristle with barricades. The combatants are pouring in by the thousand. Several printers have released their workmen. Maes, the brewer in the Marceau suburb, is ready to march at the head of his helpers. Coming along the Dauphine passage, I stepped into our friend Joubert’s; his book store is a veritable arsenal, filled with arms.”
“Several armorers’ shops have been invaded,” Duresnel went on. “On the Place of the Bourse I met Etienne Arago, the director of the Vaudeville Theater, who was taking a cart-load of guns and swords from the theater to the home of Citizen Charles Teste, whom he charged with the task of distributing them to combatants. There will be arms in abundance.”
“This evening,” said Martin, “I saw in St. Antoine women and children carrying paving stones to the upper stories of their houses, to hurl down upon the troops. The word is being passed along: ‘Down with the pretorians! Death to all the officers!’”
“When the women take part in a revolution,” put in Madam Lebrenn, “it is a good omen. Here are some old friends coming,” she added. “They will have news also.”
Upon the word, in came General Oliver, accompanied by the old mounted artilleryman of the republican Army of the Rhine and Moselle. Duchemin’s hair and moustache were now both as white as snow
; but he was still alert and active, and carried under his arm an old rusted musket. The bitterness of exile had furrowed Oliver’s face with premature wrinkles, and turned his hair nigh as white as his companion’s.
Oliver affectionately gave his hand to Charlotte, saying as he did so, “Good evening, my dear Madam Lebrenn; — good evening, Madam Henory. Oh, ho! Here you are occupied like the Gallic women of old on the eve of battle. And here is brave Castillon filling shells. The picture is complete.”
Duchemin, also, saluted the company in military fashion, and said, “In my capacity as old artilleryman, I shall lend you a hand, Castillon.”
“So here you are at last,” cried John Lebrenn cordially to the General. “Our friends and I were beginning to get surprised, and almost worried at not having seen you since the promulgation of the ordinances.”
“Before two days have passed the Bourbons will be driven from France,” returned the General. “The army can not stand against Paris in insurrection. There are but twelve thousand troops in the city; the victory of the people is assured.”
“I fear you are mistaken, General,” interposed Martin.
“You may be certain of what I tell you. I have my information from several old officers of the Empire, who have maintained some sort of relations with the War Ministry.”
“Your old friends are thinking, perhaps, of giving the movement a Bonapartist turn?” asked Lebrenn.
“They are thinking seriously of it. They besought me to attend a reunion at the house of Colonel Gourgaud, where I met Dumoulin, Dufays, Bacheville, Clavel, and other old comrades. I strove hard, but ineffectually, to convince them that Napoleon’s death had made all thought of empire impossible. I remained alone in my opinion.”
“I am afraid you will fall again under the influence of your old war-time memories, and that of your companions-in-arms,” said Lebrenn, kindly.
