"I am sensible of that," coldly replied Gilbert.
"And you will bring the king back to me safe and unhurt?" she said with a solemn gesture.
"Yes, Madame."
"Reflect that you will answer for his safety with your head."
Gilbert bowed.
"Reflect that your head is answerable," cried Marie Antoinette, with the menacing and pitiless authority of an absolute monarch.
"Upon my head be the risk," said the doctor, again bowing. "Yes, Madame; and this pledge I should consider as a hostage of but little value, if I believed the king's safety to be at all threatened. But I have said, Madame, that it is to a triumph that I this day conduct his Majesty."
"I must have news of him every hour," added the queen.
"You shall, Madame; and this I swear to you."
"Go, sir; go at once. I hear the drums; the king is about to leave the palace."
Gilbert bowed, and descending the grand staircase, found himself face to face with one of the king's aides-de-camp, who was seeking him by order of his Majesty.
They made him get into a carriage which belonged to Monsieur de Beauvau; the grand master of the ceremonies not allowing, as he had not produced proofs of his nobility, that he should travel in one of the king's carriages.
Gilbert smiled on finding himself alone in a carriage with arms upon its panels, Monsieur de Beauvau being on horseback, curvetting by the side of the royal carriage.
Then it struck him that it was ridiculous in him thus to be occupying a carriage on which was painted a princely coronet and armorial bearings.
This scruple was still annoying him when, from the midst of a crowd of National Guards, who were following the carriage, he heard the following conversation, though carried on in a half-whisper by men who were curiously stretching out their necks to look at him.
"Oh! that one,—that is the Prince de Beauvau."
"Why," cried a comrade, "you are mistaken."
"I tell you it must be so, since the carriage has the prince's arms upon it."
"The arms! the arms! I say that means nothing."
"Zounds!" said another, "what do the arms prove?"
"They prove that if the arms of Monsieur de Beauvau are upon the coach, it must be Monsieur de Beauvau who is inside of it."
"Monsieur de Beauveau,—is he a patriot?" asked a woman.
"Pooh!" exclaimed the National Guard. Gilbert again smiled.
"But I tell you," said the first contradictor, "that it is not the prince. The prince is stout; that one is thin. The prince wears the uniform of a commandant of the guards; that one wears a black coat,—it is his intendant."
A murmur, which was by no means favorable to Gilbert, arose among the crowd, who had degraded him by giving him this title, which was not at all flattering.
"Why, no, by the devil's horns!" cried a loud voice, the sound of which made Gilbert start. It was the voice of a man who with his elbows and his fists was clearing his way to get near the carriage. "No," said he, "it is neither Monsieur de Beauvau nor his intendant. It is that brave and famous patriot, and even the most famous of all the patriots. Why, Monsieur Gilbert, what the devil are you doing in the carriage of a prince?"
"Ha! it is you, Father Billot!" exclaimed the doctor.
"By Heaven," replied the farmer, "I took good care not to lose the opportunity!"
"And Pitou?" asked Gilbert.
"Oh, he is not far off. Hilloa, Pitou! where are you? Come this way; come quickly!"
And Pitou, on hearing this invitation, managed by a dexterous use of his shoulders to slip through the crowd till he reached Billot's side, and then with admiration bowed to Gilbert.
"Good-day, Monsieur Gilbert," said he.
"Good-day, Pitou; good-day, my friend."
"Gilbert! Gilbert who is he?" inquired the crowd of one another.
"Such is fame," thought the doctor,—"well known at Villers-Cotterets; yes; but at Paris popularity is everything."
He alighted from the carriage, which continued its onward progress at a walk, while Gilbert moved on with the crowd, on foot, leaning on Billot's arm.
He in a few words related to the farmer his visit to Versailles, the good disposition of the king and the royal family; he in a few minutes preached such a propaganda of royalism to the group by which he was surrounded that, simple and delighted, these worthy people, who were yet easily induced to receive good impressions, uttered loud and continued shouts of "Long live the king!" which, taken up by those who preceded them, soon reached the head of the line, and deafened Louis XVI. in his carriage.
"I will see the king!" cried Billot, electrified. "I must get close to him, and see him well; I came all this way on purpose. I will judge him by his face; the eye of an honest man can always speak for itself. Let us get nearer to his carriage, Monsieur Gilbert, shall we not?"
"Wait a little, and it will be easy for us to do so," replied Gilbert; "for I see one of Monsieur de Beauvau's aides-de-camp, who is seeking for some one, coming this way."
And, in fact, a cavalier, who, managing his horse with every sort of precaution, amid the groups of fatigued but joyous pedestrians, was endeavoring to get near the carriage which Gilbert had just left.
Gilbert called to him.
"Are you not looking, sir, for Doctor Gilbert" he inquired.
"Himself," replied the aide-de-camp.
"In that case, I am he."
"Monsieur de Beauvau sends for you, at the king's request."
These high-sounding words made Billot's eyes open widely; and on the crowd they had the effect of making them open their ranks to allow Gilbert to pass. Gilbert glided through them, followed by Billot and Pitou, the aide-de-camp going before them, who kept on repeating:
"Make room, gentlemen, make room; let us pass, in the king's name, let us pass!"
Gilbert soon reached the door of the royal carriage, which was moving onward as if drawn by Merovingian oxen.
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Chapter VII
The Journey
THUS pushing and thus pushed, but still following Monsieur de Beauvau's aide-de-camp, Gilbert, Billot, and Pitou at length reached the carriage in which the king, accompanied by Messieurs d'Estaing and de Villequier, was slowly advancing amid the crowd, which continually increased.
Extraordinary, unknown, unheard-of spectacle! for it was the first time that such a one had been seen. All those National Guards from the surrounding villages—impromptu soldiers suddenly sprung up—hastened with cries of joy to greet the king in his progress, saluting him with their benedictions, endeavoring to gain a look from him, and then, instead of returning to their homes, taking place in the procession, and accompanying their monarch towards Paris.
And why? No one could have given a reason for it. Were they obeying an instinct? They had seen, but they wished again to see, this well-beloved king.
For it must he acknowledged that at this period Louis XVI. was an adored king, to whom the French would have raised altars, had it not been for the profound contempt with which Voltaire had inspired them for all altars.
Louis XVI. therefore had no altars raised to him, but solely because the thinkers of that day had too high an esteem for him to inflict upon him such a humiliation.
Louis XVI.perceived Gilbert leaning upon the arm of Billot; behind them marched Pitou, still dragging after him his long sabre.
"Ah, Doctor," cried the king, "what magnificent weather, and what a magnificent people!"
"You see, Sire," replied Gilbert. Then, turning towards the king: "What did I promise your Majesty?"
"Yes, sir, yes; and you have worthily fulfilled your promise."
The king raised his head, and with the intention of being heard:—
"We move but slowly," said he; "and yet it appears to me that we advance but too rapidly for all that we have to see."
"Sire," said Monsieur de Beauvau, "and yet, at the pace your Majesty is going, you are travelling about one league in three hours.
It would be difficult to go more slowly."
In fact, the horses were stopped every moment; harangues and replies were interchanged; the National Guards fraternized—the word was only then invented—with the body-guards of his Majesty.
"Ah!" said Gilbert to himself, who contemplated this singular spectacle as a philosopher, "if they fraternize with the body-guards, it was because before being friends they had been enemies."
"I say, Monsieur Gilbert," said Billot, in a half-whisper, "I have had a good look at the king; I have listened to him with all my ears. Well, my opinion is that the king is an honest man!"
And the enthusiasm which animated Billot was so overpowering that he raised his voice in uttering these last words to such a pitch that the king and his staff heard him.
The officers laughed outright. The king smiled, and then, nodding his head:—
"That is praise which pleases me," said he.
These words were spoken loud enough for Billot to hear them.
"Oh, you are right, Sire, for I do not give it to everybody," replied Billot, entering at once into conversation with his king, as Michaud, the miller, did with Henry IV.
"And that flatters me so much the more," rejoined the king, much embarrassed at not knowing how to maintain his dignity as a king, and speak graciously as a good patriot.
Alas! the poor prince was not yet accustomed to call himself King of the French.
He thought that he was still called the King of France.
Billot, beside himself with joy, did not give himself the trouble to reflect whether Louis, in a philosophical point of view, had abdicated the title of king to adopt the title of a man. Billot, who felt how much this language resembled rustic plainness,—Billot applauded himself for having comprehended the king, and for having been comprehended by him.
Therefore from that moment Billot became more and more enthusiastic. He drank from the king's looks, according to the Virgilian expression, deep draughts of love for constitutional royalty, and communicated it to Pitou, who, too full of his own love and the superfluity of Billot's, overflowed at first in stentorian shouts, then in more squeaking, and finally in less articulate ones of:—
"Long live the king! Long live the father of the people!"
This modification in the voice of Pitou was produced by degrees in proportion as he became more and more hoarse.
Pitou was as hoarse as a bull-frog when the procession reached the Point du Jour, where the Marquis de Lafayette, on his celebrated white charger, was keeping in order the undisciplined and agitated cohorts of the National Guard, who had from five o'clock that morning lined the road to receive the royal procession.
At this time it was nearly two o'clock.
The interview between the king and this new chief of armed France passed off in a manner that was satisfactory to all present.
The king, however, began to feel fatigued. He no longer spoke; he contented himself with merely smiling.
The general-in-chief of the Parisian militia could no longer utter a command; he only gesticulated.
The king had the satisfaction to find that the crowd as frequently cried: "Long live the king!" as "Long live Lafayette!" Unfortunately, this was the last time he was destined to enjoy this gratification of his self-love.
During this, Gilbert remained constantly at the door of the king's carriage, Billot near Gilbert, Pitou near Billot.
Gilbert, faithful to his promise, had found means, since his departure from Versailles, to despatch four couriers to the queen.
These couriers had each been the bearer of good news, for at every step of his journey the king had seen caps thrown up in the air as he passed, only on each of these caps shone the colors of the nation, a species of reproach addressed to the white cockade which the king's guards and the king himself wore in their hats.
In the midst of his joy and enthusiasm, this discrepancy in the cockades was the only thing which annoyed Billot.
Billot had on his cocked hat an enormous tricolored cockade.
The king had a white cockade in his hat; the tastes of the subject and the king were not therefore absolutely similar.
This idea so much perplexed him that he could not refrain from unburdening his mind upon the subject to Gilbert, at a moment when the latter was not conversing with the king.
"Monsieur Gilbert," said he to him, "how is it that his Majesty does not wear the national cockade?"
"Because, my dear Billot, either the king does not know that there is a new cockade, or he considers that the cockade he wears ought to be the cockade of the nation."
"Oh, no! oh, no! since his cockade is a white one, and our cockade—ours—is a tricolored one."
"One moment," said Gilbert, stopping Billot just as he was about to launch with heart and soul into the arguments advanced by the newspapers of the day; "the king's cockade is white, as the flag of France is white. The king is in no way to blame for this. Cockade and flag were white long before he came into the world. Moreover, my dear Billot, that flag has performed great feats, and so has the white cockade. There was a white cockade in the hat of Admiral de Suffren, when he reestablished our flag in the East Indies. There was a white cockade in the hat of Assas, and it was by that the Germans recognized him in the night, when he allowed himself to be killed rather than that they should take his soldiers by surprise. There was a white cockade in the hat of Marshal Saxe, when he defeated the English at Fontenoy. There was, in fine, a white cockade in the hat of the Prince de Condé, when he beat the Imperialists at Rocroi, at Fribourg, and at Lens. The white cockade has done all this, and a great many other things, my dear Billot; while the national cockade, which will perhaps make a tour round the world, as Lafayette has predicted, has not yet had time to accomplish anything, seeing that it has existed only for the last three days. I do not say that it will rest idle, do you understand; but, in short, having as yet done nothing, it gives the king full right to wait till it has done something."
"How? the national cockade has as yet done nothing?" cried Billot. "Has it not taken the Bastille?"
"It has," said Gilbert, sorrowfully; "you are right, Billot."
"And that is why," triumphantly rejoined the farmer,—"that is why the king ought to adopt it."
Gilbert gave a furious nudge with his elbow into Billot's ribs, for he had perceived the king was listening, and then, in a low tone:—
"Are you mad, Billot?" said he; "and against whom was the Bastille taken, then? Against royalty, it seems to me. And now you would make the king wear the trophies of your triumph and the insignia of his own defeat. Madman! the king is all heart, all goodness, all candor, and you would wish him to show himself a hypocrite!"
"But," said Billot, more humbly, without, however, giving up the argument altogether, "it was not precisely against the king that the Bastille was taken; it was against despotism."
Gilbert shrugged up his shoulders, but with the delicacy of the superior man, who will not place his foot on his inferior, for fear that he should crush him.
"No," said Billot, again becoming animated, "it is not against our good king that we have fought, but against his satellites."
Now, in those days they said, speaking politically, satellites instead of saying soldiers, as they said in the theatres, courser instead of horse.
"Moreover," continued Billot, and with some appearance of reason, "he disapproves them, since he comes thus in the midst of us; and if he disapproves them, he must approve us. It is for our happiness and his honor that we have worked,—we, the conquerors of the Bastille."
"Alas! alas!" murmured Gilbert, who did not know how to reconcile the appearance of the king's features with that which he knew must be passing in his heart.
As to the king, he began, amid the confused murmurs of the march, to understand some few words of the conversation entered into by his side.
Gilbert, who perceived the attention which the king was paying to the discussion, made every effort to lead Billot on to less slippery g
round than that on which he had ventured.
Suddenly the procession stopped; it had arrived at the Cours la Reine, at the gate formerly called La Conférence, in the Champs Élysées.
There a deputation of electors and aldermen, presided over by the new mayor, Bailly, had drawn themselves up in fine array, with a guard of three hundred men, commanded by a colonel, besides at least three hundred members of the National Assembly, taken, as it will be readily imagined, from the ranks of the Tiers État.
Two of the electors united their strength and their address to hold in equilibrium a vast salver of gilt plate, upon which were lying two enormous keys,—the keys of the city of Paris during the days of Henry IV.
This imposing spectacle at once put a stop to all individual conversations; and every one, whether in the crowd or in the ranks, immediately directed their attention to the speeches about to be pronounced on the occasion.
Bailly, the worthy man of science, the admirable astronomer, who had been made a deputy in defiance to his own will, a mayor in spite of his objections, an orator notwithstanding his unwillingness, had prepared a long speech. This speech had for its exordium, according to the strictest laws of rhetoric, a laudatory encomium on the king, from the coming into power of Monsieur Turgot down to the taking of the Bastille. Little was wanting, such privilege has eloquence, to attribute to the king the initiative in the measures which the people had been compelled unwillingly to adopt.
Bailly was delighted with the speech he had prepared, when an incident (it is Bailly himself who relates this incident in his Memoirs) furnished him with a new exordium, very much more picturesque than the one he had prepared,—the only one, moreover, which remained engraved on the minds of the people, always ready to seize upon good and, above all, fine-sounding phrases, when founded upon a material fact.
While walking towards the place of meeting, with the aldermen and the electors, Bailly was alarmed at the weight of the keys which he was about to present to the king.
"Do you believe," said he, laughingly, "that after having shown these to the king, I will undergo the fatigue of carrying them back to Paris?"
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