The Battle of the Strong. Gilbert Parker

last vestige of

       Louis’s power pass for ever. That day ten thousand of the

       sans-culottes forced their way into the palace to kill him. A faithful

       few surrounded him. In the mad turmoil, we were fearful, he was

       serene. ‘Feel,’ said Louis, placing his hand on his bosom, ‘feel

       whether this is the beating of a heart shaken by fear.’ Ah, my

       friend, your heart would have clamped in misery to hear the Queen

       cry: ‘What have I to fear? Death? it is as well to-day as

       to-morrow; they can do no more!’ Their lives were saved, the day

       passed, but worse came after.

       “The tenth of August came. With it too, the end-the dark and bloody

       end-of the Swiss Guard. The Jacobins had their way at last. The

       Swiss Guard died in the Court of the Carrousel as they marched to

       the Assembly to save the King. Thus the last circle of defence

       round the throne was broken. The palace was given over to flame and

       the sword. Of twenty nobles of the court I alone escaped. France

       is become a slaughter-house. The people cried out for more liberty,

       and their liberators gave them the freedom of death. A fortnight

       ago, Danton, the incomparable fiend, let loose his assassins upon

       the priests of God. Now Paris is made a theatre where the people

       whom Louis and his nobles would have died to save have turned every

       street into a stable of carnage, every prison and hospital into a

       vast charnel-house. One last revolting thing alone remains to be

       done—the murder of the King; then this France that we have loved

       will have no name and no place in our generation. She will rise

       again, but we shall not see her, for our eyes have been blinded with

       blood, for ever darkened by disaster. Like a mistress upon whom we

       have lavished the days of our youth and the strength of our days,

       she has deceived us; she has stricken us while we slept. Behold a

       Caliban now for her paramour!

       “Weep with me, for France despoils me. One by one my friends have

       fallen beneath the axe. Of my four sons but one remains. Henri was

       stabbed by Danton’s ruffians at the Hotel de Ville; Gaston fought

       and died with the Swiss Guard, whose hacked and severed limbs were

       broiled and eaten in the streets by these monsters who mutilate the

       land. Isidore, the youngest, defied a hundred of Robespierre’s

       cowards on the steps of the Assembly, and was torn to pieces by the

       mob. Etienne alone is left. But for him and for the honour of my

       house I too would find a place beside the King and die with him.

       Etienne is with de la Rochejaquelein in Brittany. I am here at

       Rouen.

       “Brittany and Normandy still stand for the King. In these two

       provinces begins the regeneration of France: we call it the War of

       the Vendee. On that Isle of Jersey there you should almost hear the

       voice of de la Rochejaquelein and the marching cries of our loyal

       legions. If there be justice in God we shall conquer. But there

       will be joy no more for such as you or me, nor hope, nor any peace.

       We live only for those who come after. Our duty remains, all else

       is dead. You did well to go, and I do well to stay.

       “By all these piteous relations you shall know the importance of the

       request I now set forth.

       “My cousin by marriage of the House of Vaufontaine has lost all his

       sons. With the death of the Prince of Vaufontaine, there is in

       France no direct heir to the house, nor can it, by the law, revert

       to my house or my heirs. Now of late the Prince hath urged me to

       write to you—for he is here in seclusion with me—and to unfold to

       you what has hitherto been secret. Eleven years ago the only nephew

       of the Prince, after some naughty escapades, fled from the Court

       with Rullecour the adventurer, who invaded the Isle of Jersey. From

       that hour he has been lost to France. Some of his companions in

       arms returned after a number of years. All with one exception

       declared that he was killed in the battle at St. Heliers. One,

       however, maintains that he was still living and in the prison

       hospital when his comrades were set free.

       “It is of him I write to you. He is—as you will perchance

       remember—the Comte de Tournay. He was then not more than seventeen

       years of age, slight of build, with brownish hair, dark grey eyes,

       and had over the right shoulder a scar from a sword thrust. It

       seemeth little possible that, if living, he should still remain in

       that Isle of Jersey. He may rather have returned to obscurity in

       France or have gone to England to be lost to name and remembrance

      —or even indeed beyond the seas.

       “That you may perchance give me word of him is the object of my

       letter, written in no more hope than I live; and you can well guess

       how faint that is. One young nobleman preserved to France may yet

       be the great unit that will save her.

       “Greet my poor countrymen yonder in the name of one who still waits

       at a desecrated altar; and for myself you must take me as I am, with

       the remembrance of what I was, even

       “Your faithful friend and loving kinsman,

       “CHANIER.”

       “All this, though in the chances of war you read it not till

       wintertide, was told you at Rouen this first day of September 1792.”

      During the reading, broken by feeling and reflective pauses on the chevalier’s part, the listeners showed emotion after the nature of each. The Sieur de Mauprat’s fingers clasped and unclasped on the top of his cane, little explosions of breath came from his compressed lips, his eyebrows beetled over till the eyes themselves seemed like two glints of flame. Delagarde dropped a fist heavily upon the table, and held it there clinched, while his heel beat a tattoo of excitement upon the floor. Guida’s breath came quick and fast—as Ranulph said afterwards, she was “blanc comme un linge.” She shuddered painfully when the slaughter and burning of the Swiss Guards was read. Her brain was so swimming with the horrors of anarchy that the latter part of the letter dealing with the vanished Count of Tournay passed by almost unheeded.

      But this particular matter greatly interested Ranulph and de Mauprat. They leaned forward eagerly, seizing every word, and both instinctively turned towards Detricand when the description of de Tournay was read.

      As for Detricand himself, he listened to the first part of the