Chapter XIX (1)
Out of a cloudless sky a hard, bright, metallic sun was shining upon Paris, as it had shone, without variation, for the last five weeks, looking down unwinking on a Terror worse than that of ’93. And along the deserted streets its companion, the glacial East wind, frolicked in a dance of death, stirring the April dust, and fluttering, on the Pont Neuf, the black flag which Henri Quatre held in his hands of stone. Neither Charles X nor Louis-Philippe reigned in Paris now, but the cholera. Long ago the supply of hearses had proved insufficient, and there crawled along, to gather up the daily harvest of eight or nine hundred dead, artillery waggons, furniture vans, even fiacres. Even so, a sheeted corpse could often be seen in a doorway awaiting burial—to receive it, perhaps, at the hands of that devoted company of young men which numbered some of the first names of France. Yet the machinery of life worked on as usual—the Chambers and the law courts sat, the Bourse was open, professors lectured and the theatres were far from empty, though not a soul had more than half a hope of seeing the sun rise next day, and every time a man left his home he said farewell to wife and child.
From an archway in the long Rue de Sèvres, literally a street of the dead, for on one side at least there was not a single house unstricken, came suddenly a tall priest in a cassock, a garb not seen till now, in the streets of Paris, since the Days of July. His eyes, sunk in a tired, strained face, blinked a little as they met the light, for it had been dark in the garret where he had just confessed the dying man—the fourth cholera patient whom he had visited that day. He pulled the cloak he was wearing closer over his breast as he turned north-eastward and met the wind.
As he crossed the end of the Rue du Bac a fiacre passed him at a lumbering trot, a coffin across the seat. Ere the noise and rattle had died away in the sunny, silent street, the priest heard alert steps behind him, and a voice that he knew well crying, “Prosper! Prosper! que diable! stop a moment!”
Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon slackened his pace and turned his head, but did not stop. “I have just come from a case.”
Armand, arriving abreast of his cousin, sniffed at the saturated handkerchief which he held. “Peste, so I supposed. (By the way, how very apt is that expletive just now!) But everybody has either come from a case, or is going to a case... or is about to become a case, so that is nothing. I will walk with you; I am going this way.”
“How is our grandmother?” asked the priest, as they fell into step together.
“Never better. Strange how she fears a cold and defies the plague. She keeps her rooms inundated with camphor and chloride. But Madame de Camain died last night, and the Comtesse de Montlivault, I hear this morning, is ‘prise.’”.
“God have mercy on them!” said Prosper, crossing himself. “It seems to me that in the last few days the Faubourg St. Germain has suffered more than the poorer quarters.”
“That is so, I believe,” returned his cousin. “Figure to yourself that the rabbit warren of the Palais-Royal is apparently more healthy than our large houses with their gardens, for I am told that there has not been a single case in those airless glass passages.”
They walked on in silence for a little, their footsteps echoing in the deserted street, the icy wind cold on their faces, the sun fierce overhead. Even Armand, untouched by the pest, by labours for the stricken, or, apparently, by apprehension, looked ill, though he was jauntily dressed in the new spring fashions, in a peacock-blue coat with olive-green collar, a flowered waistcoat and white cashmere trousers. The sight of a man hurrying past them, holding an onion to his nose, struck him into speech again.
“Heavens!” he exclaimed, “I had really rather have the cholera than carry about a raw onion. You do not carry anything, I notice, Prosper; not, I dare say, that it is much good.—By the way, I have long been wanting to tell you that I regard you as the bravest man I know, and if (as is probable) you have heard me say anything uncomplimentary about priests I beg you will consider it unsaid. I am really proud to be your kinsman.... Don’t spoil it by saying that you are only doing your duty, or tell me that the Archbishop of Paris has come out of hiding and the Archbishop of Besançon returned from Rome to do the same as you are doing, for I do not believe that even his Eminence of Rohan dislikes it as much as you. Mort de ma vie, but you must have seen some horrible things lately!”
“The worst thing that I have seen,” said Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon sadly, “was not the visitation of the plague, but the outburst of the vile passions of men, excited by fear, and played upon by the unscrupulous.”
“You mean the murders, at the beginning of the outbreak, due to the report that it was caused by poison? But what can you expect? There was a man hanged on a lamp-post, as in the good old times, in one of those very streets, for the same reason. And the Republican newspapers have proclaimed that even the cholera is a scourge less cruel than the government of Louis-Philippe. You remember how the Duc d’Orléans went with the late Casimir Périer to the Hôtel-Dieu to visit the sick? Well, they said that Louis-Philippe had sent his son there to gloat over the misery of the people, and that the people would return his visit... after the manner of the Tenth of August and the Twenty-ninth of July!”
The young man’s tone was not free from satisfaction. The priest, aware of the alliance between a certain section of the Legitimists and the Extreme Left, turned and looked at him.
“I hope,” he said sternly, “that Madame’s party does not stain their cause by using such weapons.”
“We have no need,” returned Armand with an air. “You will soon see the gleam of the noblest weapon of all—the sword.”
“The sword, so be it!” said Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon. “But not the dagger—not another conspiracy of the Rue des Prouvaires, I trust.”
They had come to the Place St. Sulpice, and stopped.
“You speak as if I had been implicated in that,” said his cousin, rather aggrieved. “Or as if I were M. de Berthier, who tried to run over the King and Queen. No, I am for a stroke of a different kind. Wait a little, a very little, Prosper, and you will see the South in flames for Marie-Caroline, and then the West, Brittany, and Vendée...”
“And then?”
“Then you will see Louis-Philippe, his large family and his umbrella, disencumbering the Tuileries of their presence, and at Rheims a child—a mother and child—crowned... as you may see at this hour in there.” He pointed with one hand to the façade of St. Sulpice, while with the other he tugged something from his pocket.
“Cousin, you do not serve your cause by blasphemy!” said the priest sharply.
Armand looked innocent. “But I thought the idea would appeal to you! It occurs to me, as an omen, every time I enter a church. Mea culpa!... Take this for your cholera cases, Monsignor, in expiation. I was going to give it you in any case, but now it will atone, perhaps, for comparing Marie-Caroline to Our Lady. Au revoir—if the Fates permit.” He thrust a roll of notes into his cousin’s hand, lifted his hat, and turned down the Rue du Pot-de-Fer towards the Luxembourg.
(2)
It was not to admire the spring foliage of the trees in that now deserted garden that Armand walked slowly eastwards along one of its alleys. Yet he was engaged, rather strangely, in counting the trunks. When he reached the thirty-fifth, he stopped, looked about for the nearest seat, and sitting down upon it, pulled an opened letter from his pocket and re-read it.
It was from his wife at Plaisance, the family seat in Normandy, whither she and the child had been sent for safety. It informed him merely that she and Maurice were very well, and concluded by hoping that all at the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon were in the same condition.
Armand made a slight grimace as he folded and refolded this epistle. Stretched out on the seat, his eyes raised to the new leaves, it occurred to him again to wish that his wife were a Catholic, and had a director, who might perhaps prescribe to her a more conciliatory line of conduct. Once, indeed, he had congratulated himself that in his domestic affairs, at least, no priest could intermeddle; now he thought regretfully of a certain friend of his acquaintance, a great deal more culpable than he, whose wife, in obedience (he suspected) to her confessor, was trying to win back her husband by a demeanour of unvarying amiability. Well, that was certainly not Horatia’s way at present, nor was he sure that he would have liked it if it had been; but it would have made things more comfortable.
He had not set eyes on Laurence de Vigerie since the fatal night of the masked ball a month ago. As soon as she could be moved she had been hurried out of Paris under medical supervision, and she was now completing her convalescence at Spa, whence she wrote to him every few days. It had needed all her influence to keep him from following her thither, indeed he had only been restrained by her express prohibition, and the knowledge that if he left Paris at this juncture he cut himself off from communication with the cause for which they were both working. For, as Armand had hinted to his cousin, a crisis in Legitimist affairs was very near now. Since February the Duchesse de Berry had definitely resolved to come to France. The younger and more ardent spirits of her party, impatient of delay, continually wrote urging her to hasten. Now, with the cholera occupying the attention of the government, which had, moreover, lost Casimir-Périer from its head, with the Republicans about to rise, so it was rumoured, against Louis-Philippe, the favourable moment seemed at last arrived. And Armand, deprived of his regular channel of information through Madame de Vigerie, had come to this peaceful resort in quest of news.
He had not long to wait, for there presently approached along the deserted avenue, from the opposite direction, another gilded youth of about his own age, muffled almost up to his eyes in a cloak. He also appeared to be counting the trees, and when he arrived opposite Armand’s seat came and sat down on it, without looking at its occupant. Then, without warning, he suddenly shot out the word “Marie.”
“Caroline,” responded Armand instantly.
And they both looked at each other and laughed, for if these conspirators resorted sometimes to the methods of opéra-bouffe, they did not take them very seriously.
“Any news this morning?” inquired Armand.
“The best,” answered the other. “Late last night the Committee received a letter from Madame for transmission to the chiefs in the West, warning them to be ready by the third of May. She has probably embarked by now!”
Armand stared at him a moment. Then he sprang to his feet, and lifting his olive-green hat, cried aloud to the empty garden: “At last, at last! Vive la guerre!”