Александр Дюма
Taking the Bastile
"How must I fall, pray tell me, count?" demanded the sovereign haughtily; "teach me."
"As a victim," was the answer, "like a Christian queen, smiling and forgiving those who strike you. If I had five hundred thousand like myself, I might say, Let us have at them this night, and to-morrow you would sleep in the Tuileries, the throne conquered!"
"Woe is me! you despair on whom was set my final hope."
"I despair because all France thinks like Paris, and your army if victorious in the capital, will be engulfed by the other towns. Have courage enough, my lady, to sheathe the sword."
"Is this why I have gathered brave men around me? why I breathed courage into them?" wailed the Queen.
"If you are not of my opinion, madam, order, and we march at once to Paris! Speak."
So much devotion was in this offer that the hearer was appalled. She threw herself disconsolate on a sofa, where she struggled for a long time with her pride.
"Count," she said at length, "I shall remain inactive as you desire. I am not cross, though I have one thing to scold you for. I only learn by chance that you have a brother in the military service."
"Valence is in Bercheny's Hussars, yes, madam."
"Why have you never spoken of the young man? he deserves a higher grade in the regiment."
"He is young and inexperienced; he is not fit to command. If your Majesty deigned to lower your view upon me, a Charny, that is no reason for me to elevate my family at the expense of brave gentlemen worthier than brothers of mine."
"You have other brothers?"
"Isidore is another; two ready to die for your Majesty."
"Does he need nothing?"
"Nothing; we are lucky enough to place not merely life but wealth at your Majesty's feet."
As he spoke, the Queen thrilled with this delicate probity; a moan from the next room aroused them.
Rising, the Queen ran to the door, opened it and screamed loudly. She saw a woman writhing on the carpet in dreadful spasms.
"It is the countess, your wife," she faltered. "Can she have overheard us?"
"No," said he, "otherwise, she would have let us know that she could hear us."
He sprang towards Andrea and caught her up in his arms. Two paces off, the Queen stood, pale and cold, but trembling with anxiety.
CHAPTER XX.
THE TRIO OF LOVE
Without knowing who was helping her, Andrea began to recover consciousness but instinctively she knew help had come. At length, with open but ghostly eyes, she stared at Charny without yet recognizing him. She pushed him away, with a scream, then.
The Queen averted her eyes although she ought to have played the woman's part of comforter. She cast off her sister instead of supporting her.
"Pardon her, my lady," said Charny, again taking his wife in his strong arms, "but something out of the way causes this. My lady is not subject to fainting fits and this is, I believe, the first time she has had one in your presence."
"She must have felt much pain," returned the Queen, going back to her first impression that Andrea had overheard them.
"No doubt," said the count, "and you might let me have her carried to her own rooms."
The Queen rang a bell; but at the first tinkle Andrea stiffened in a culvulsion and screamed in delirium:
"Oh, our Gilbert!"
The Queen shuddered to hear the name and the astonished count placed his wife on a sofa.
The servant who ran at the call was dismissed.
Queen and nobleman looked at each other as the sufferer seemed with closed eyes to have another fit. Charny, kneeling by her, had hard work to keep her on the lounge.
"I think I know this name," said Marie Antoinette, "from its not being the first time the countess has used it."
But as though the recollection was a menace, Andrea opened her eyes and made an effort by which she stood up. Her first intelligent glance was fondly upon Charny, who was now upright. As if this involuntary manifestation of her mind was unworthy her Spartan soul, she turned her gaze only to meet the Queen's. She bowed at once.
"Good heavens, what is the matter?" inquired the count: "you alarm me, for you are usually so brave and strong – to be prey to such a swoon."
"Such dreadful things have happened at Paris where you were, that if men are trembling at them, women may be excused for fainting. I am so glad you came away from the city."
"Is it on my account that you felt so ill?" queried the noble.
"Why, certainly, count," said Marie Antoinette as the lady made no sound. "Why do you doubt it? The countess is not a Queen; she has a right to be afraid for those she loves."
"Oh, madam," rejoined Charny, perceiving jealousy in the slur, "I am sure that the countess feels more fear for her sovereign than for herself."
"Still, why do we find you in the swoon in the next room?" inquired the royal lady.
"I cannot tell, for I am ignorant, but in this life of fatigue and terror, led these three days, a woman's fainting is natural enough, meseems."
"True," said the Queen, knowing that Andrea could not be driven out of her defenses.
"For that matter, your Majesty has weeping eyes," retorted the countess, with that recovered calmness which was the more embarrassing as it was pure effort of her will and was felt to be a screen over her real feelings.
Charny thought he perceived the same ironical tone that had marked the Queen's speaking a while ago.
"It is not astonishing," reproved he, with slight sternness to which his voice was unaccustomed, "that a queen should weep who loves her people and knows that their blood had flowed."
"Happily God hath spared yours," said Andrea, as coldly and impenetrably as ever.
"But her Majesty is not in question. We are talking about you. You have been frightened?"
"I, frightened?"
"You cannot deny you were in pain; has some mishap befallen you? Is there anybody you want to complain of – this Gilbert, whom you mentioned, for example?"
"Did I utter that name?" said Andrea with such a tone of dread that the count was more startled by the outcry than by the swoon. "Strange, for I did not know it, till the King mentioned it as that of a learned physician, freshly arrived from America, I believe, and who was friendly there with General Lafayette. They say he is a very honorable man," concluded Andrea with perfect simplicity.
"Then why this emotion, my dear?" said the Queen; "you spoke this Gilbert's name as though it were wrung from you by torture."
"Very likely. When I went into the royal study, I beheld a stern man clad in the grim black, who was narrating the most sombre and horrid things – with frightful realism, the murders of Flesselles and Launay. I was frightened and dropped insensible. I may have spoken in my spell and the name of Gilbert would be uttered."
"It is likely," said Charny, evidently disposed to let the discussion drop. "At least you are recovered now?"
"Completely."
"I have only one thing to entreat," said the Queen to her Lifeguardsman. "Go and tell the generals to camp where their troops are stationed and the King will issue orders to-morrow."
The count bowed but darted an affectionately anxious look on Andrea which the Queen remarked.
"Will you not return to the King with me?" inquired she of the countess.
"Oh, no," replied the latter eagerly; "I beg leave to retire."
"Oh, the King has been pleasant but you would rather not see him again? I understand. You may go, and let the count carry out his instructions."
She glanced at the lord as much as to say: "Return soon!"
And his look replied: "As soon as possible."
Andrea, with a heaving and oppressed bosom, watched her husband's movements, but as soon as he had disappeared, her forces failed her and the Queen had to run to her with the smelling salts as she sank on a stool, apologizing for the breach of etiquette in sitting in the royal presence.
The feeling between the pair was strange. The Queen seemed to have affection for her attendant and the latter respect for her mistress, but they were like enemies at times.
"You know, dear countess, that etiquette is not made for you. But you have nothing to say to me about this Dr. Gilbert, whose sight made so profound an impression on you?"
The woman had reflected in an instant. Whatever the relation between the Queen, who was suspected of having paramours, and the King, perhaps not so gullible as he looked, Marie Antoinette might draw from her royal consort the particulars of the mesmeric trance in which Gilbert had thrown the Lady of Charny. Better her relation than the King's.
With the energy of lunacy, she ran from one door to another, fastened them all, and when assured that nobody could hear or see, she flung herself on her knees before her mistress.
"Save me, in heaven's name, save me!" she wailed: "and I will tell you everything!"
CHAPTER XXI.
THE QUEEN AND HER MASTER
Andrea's confession was a long one for it was not until eleven at night that the royal boudoir door opened, and on the sill was seen the Countess of Charny, kissing her mistress's hand.
She went away with weeping eyes but the Queen's were scorching, as she paced her room.
She gave order that she was to be disturbed on no account unless for news from Paris.
At the supposition that Charny had at last perceived that his wife was still young and fair, the Queen found that misfortune is nothing to a heart-chagrin.
But in the midst of her feverish torment came the cruel consolation. According to Andrea's confession she had been wronged in a mesmeric trance and Gilbert had humbled her pride forever. Somewhere was the visible token of her defeat – like a trophy of his shameful triumph, the young man had borne away in the wintry night the offspring of the occult love of the gardener's boy for his suzerain's daughter!
She could not but be wonderstricken at the magical combination of wayward fortune, by which a peasant lad had been made to love the fine lady who was to be the favorite of the Queen of France.
"So the grain of dust has been lifted up to glitter like the diamond in the lustre of the skies," she mused.
Was not this lowborn lover the living symbol of what was happening at the time, a man of the people swaying the politics of a great empire, one who personified, by privilege of the evil spirit who soared over France, the insult to its nobility and the attack on royalty by the plebeians?
While shuddering, she wanted to look upon this monster who by a crime had infused his base blood into the aristocratic blue: who had caused a Revolution that he should be delivered from the castle; it was his principles which had armed Billet, Gonchon, Marat, and the others.
He was a venomous creature and terrible; for he had ruined Andrea as her lover and wrecked the Bastile as the hater of kings.
She ought to know him to avoid him or the better to fight him. Better still to make use of him. At any price she must see him and judge him.
Two thirds of the night were passed in reverie before she sank into troubled slumber.
But even here the Revolution was her nightmare. She had a dream that she was walking in one of her German forests when a gnome seized her from behind a tree and she knew that it was Gilbert.
She shrieked and, waking, found Lady Tourzel, an attendant, by her pillow.
"The Queen is sick," she called out. "Fetch the doctor."
"What doctor is in waiting?" asked the Queen.
"Dr. Gilbert, the new honorary physician whom the King has appointed."
"You speak as if you knew him, and yet he has only been a week in this country from America, and only a day out of the Bastile?"
"Your Majesty, I read his writings, and I was so curious to see the author," said the lady, "that I had him pointed out to me as he was in his rooms."
"Ah! well, let him begin his duties. Tell him I am ailing and request his presence."
Surprised and profoundly affected, though he seemed but a little uneasy, Gilbert appeared before the Queen. With her aristocratic intelligence she read that he felt timid respect for the woman, tranquil audacity for the patient and no emotion whatever for the sovereign. She was vexed, too, that he could look so well in the black suit worn by the third class of society and one the Revolutionists chose.
The less provoking he was in bearing, the more her anger grew. She had fancied the man an odious character, one of the heroes of impudence whom she had often seen around her. She had represented as a Mirabeau, the man she hated next to Cardinal Rohan and General Lafayette, this author of Andrea's woes. He was guilty in her eyes for looking the gentleman. The proud Austrian conceived a wild hatred against one whom she thought had stolen the semblance of the rank he had no business to aspire to.
As he had not ceased to look at her while she was dismissing all her ladies, his persistency exasperated her like importunity.
"Well, sir," she snapped at him like a pistol-shot, "what are you doing in staring at me instead of telling what ails me?"
This furious apostrophe, accompanied with visual lightning, would have blasted any courtier into dropping at her feet and sueing for mercy though he was a hero, a marshal, or a demigod.
But Gilbert made answer quietly:
"The physician judges by the eyes in the first place, my lady. As your Majesty summoned me, I come not from idle curiosity but to obey your orders and fulfill my duty. As far as in my power lays, I study your Majesty."
"Am I sick?"
"Not in the usual meaning of the word, but your Majesty is superexcited."
"Why not say I am out of temper?" she queried with irony.
"Allow me to use the medical term, since I am a medical man called in."
"Be it so. Whence this superexcitement?"
"Your Majesty is too intelligent not to know that a man of medicine only judges the material state: he is not a wizard to sound at the first glance the mind of man."
"Do you mean to imply that at the second, or third time, you could not merely tell me my bodily ail but a mental one?"
"Possibly," returned Gilbert coldly.
She darted at him a withering look while he was simply staring at her with desperate fixedness. Vanquished, she tried to wrench herself away from what was alarming while fascinating, and she upset a stand so that a chocolate cup was smashed on the floor. He saw it fall and the cup shiver, but did not budge. The color flew to her brow, to which she carried her chilly hand; but she dared not direct her eyes again on the magnetizer.
"Under what master did you study?" she inquired, using a scornful tone more painful than insolence.
"I cannot answer without wounding your Majesty."
The Queen felt that he gave her an advantage and she leaped in at the opening like a lioness on a prey.
"Wound me?" she almost screamed. "I vow that you mistake. Dr. Gilbert, you have not studied the French language in as good sources as medicine, I fear. Members of my class are not wounded by inferiors, only tired."
"Excuse me, madam," he returned, "I forgot I was called in to a patient. You are about to stifle with excitement and I shall call your women to put you to bed."
She walked up and down the room, infuriated at being treated like a great child, and, turning, said:
"You are Dr. Gilbert? Strange – I have a girlish memory of one of your name. A boy who looked unkempt, tattered and torn like a little Jean Jacques Rousseau when a vagabond, who was delving the ground with the spade held in his dirty, crooked hands."
"It was I," replied the other calmly. "It was in 1772, that the little gardener's boy to whom you kindly allude, was earning his bread by working in the royal gardens of Trianon. That is seventeen years ago, and much has happened in that time. It needed no longer to make the wild boy a learned man: revolutionary eras are the forcing-beds of mind. Clear as your glance is, your Majesty does not see that the youth is a man of thirty; it is wrong to be astonished that little Gilbert, simple and uncouth, should have become a learned philosopher in the breath of two revolutions."
"Simple? perhaps we will recur to that on another occasion," said the Queen vindictively: "but let us have to do with the learned philosopher, the improved and perfect man whom I have under my eyes."
Gilbert did not notice the sneer though he knew it was a fresh insult.
"You are appointed medical attendant to the King," she continued: "it is clear that I have the welfare of my husband too near my heart to entrust his health to a stranger."
"I offered myself, madam," responded Gilbert, "and his Majesty accepted me without any doubts on my capacity and zeal. I am mainly a political physician, vouched for by Minister Necker. But if the King has need of my knowledge of the scalpel and drugs, I can be as good a healer as human science allows one of our race to be. But the King most wants, besides the good adviser and physician, a good friend."
"You, a friend of the King?" exclaimed the lady, with a new outbreak of scorn. "By virtue of your quackery and charms? have we gone back to the Dark Ages and are you going to rule France with elixirs and jugglery like a Faust?"
"I have no pretentions that way."
"Oh, why have you given that branch? you might, in the same way as you sent Andrea to sleep, put the monsters under a spell who howl and spit fire on our threshold."
This time Gilbert could not help blushing at the allusion to mesmerizing Andrea, which was of inexpressible delight to her who baited him as she believed she had left a wound.
"For you can send people to sleep," she pursued: "you no doubt have studied magnetism with those villains who make slumber a treacherous weapon and read our secrets in our sleep."
"Indeed, madam, I have studied magnetism under the wise Cagliostro."
"That teacher of moral theft, who taught his disciples how to rifle bodies and souls by his infamous practice!"
Gilbert understood all by this, and she shuddered with joy to the core at seeing him lose color.
"Wretch," she rejoiced, "I have stung him to the quick and the blood flows."
But the deepest emotions did not long hold the mesmerizer in their spell. Approaching the Queen who was rash enough to look up in her triumph and let her eyes be caught, he said:
"You are wrong to judge fellow-creatures so harshly. You denounce Cagliostro as a quack when you had a proof of his real science; when you were the Archduchess of Austria and first came to France. When I saw you at Taverney, did not that wonder-worker whom you decry show to your Majesty in a clear cup of water such a picture of your fate that you swooned away?"
Gilbert had not seen the forecast, but he knew from his master, no doubt, what Marie Antoinette had been shown. He struck so hard that she turned dreadfully pale.
"Yes," she said in a hoarse voice, "he showed me a hideous machine of bloodshed. But I do not yet know that such a thing exists."
"I know not that, but he cannot be denied the rank of sage who held such might over his fellow-beings."
"His fellows?" sneered the Queen.
"Nay, his power was so great that crowned heads sank beneath his level," went on Gilbert.
"Shame! I tell you that Cagliostro was a cowardly charlatan, and his mesmeric sleep a crime. In one case it resulted in a deed for which human justice, represented by me, shall seize the author and punish him."
"Madam, be indulgent for those who have sinned."
"Ho, ho! you confess then?"
She thought by the gentleness of his tone that he was imploring her mercy. Some forgot herself and looked at him to scorch him with her indignation.
But her glance crossed his only to melt like a steel blade on which the electric fluid falls and she felt her hatred change to fright, while she recoiled a step to elude coming wrath.
"Ah, madam, do you understand what the power is I had from the master whom you defamed? believe that if I were not the most respectful of your subjects, I could convince you by a terrible experiment. I might constrain you to write down with your own hands lines that would convince you when you read them at your release from the charm. But mark how solid is the patience and the generosity of the man whom you have been insulting, and whom you placed in the Bastile. You regret it was broken open because he was released by the people. And you will hate me, and continue to doubt when I relax the bond with which I hold you."
Ceasing to govern her with glances and magnetic passes, he allowed her to regain some self-control, like the bird in the vacuum, to whom a little air is restored.
"Send me to sleep – force me to speak or write while sleep-bound," cried the Queen, white with terror. "Have you dared? Do you know that your threat is high-treason? a crime punishable with death!"
"Do not cry out too soon. If I thus charmed you and forced you to betray your inmost secrets it would be with a witness by. He would repeat your revelations so as to leave you no doubt."
"A witness? but, think, sir, that a witness to such a deed would be an accomplice."
"A husband is not the accomplice to an experiment he favors on his wife."
"The King?" screamed Marie Antoinette with dread, revealing rather the wife than the medium reluctant to make a scene for the spiritualist: "fie, Dr. Gilbert!"
"The King, your natural defender, your sustainer," replied Gilbert quietly. "He would relate, when you were awakened, how respectful I was, while proud in proving my science on the most venerated of sovereigns."
He left her to meditate on the depth of his words.
"I see," she said at length, "you must be a mortal enemy – "
"Or a proven friend – "
"Impossible; friendship cannot dwell beside fear or distrust."
"Between subject and monarch, friendship cannot live but on the confidence the subject inspires. I have made the vow not to use my weapons but to repulse the wrongs done me. All for defense, nothing for offence!"
"Alas," moaned the Queen: "I see that you set a trap. After frightening the woman, you seek to rule the Queen."
"No, lady, I am not a paltry speculator. You are the first woman in whom I have found all feminine passions with all the dominant faculties of man. You can be a woman and a friend. I admire you and would serve you. I will do it without receiving aught from you – merely to study you. I will do more to show you how I serve you: if I am in the way send me forth."
"Send you hence," said she with gladness.
"But no doubt you will reflect that my power can be exercised from afar. It is true: but do not fear – I shall not employ it."
The Queen was musing, unable to reply to this strange man when steps were heard in the corridor.
"The King," she exclaimed.
"Then point out the door by which I may depart without being seen by him."
"Stay," she said.
He bowed, and remained impassible while she sought to read on his brow to what point triumph rose in him more plain than anger or disquiet.
"At least he might have shown his delight," she thought.
