The Hero of the People. Alexandre Dumas

knows? perhaps what you went over to the United States to do—found a republic.”

      “France has not a republican turn of mind,” said the other, shaking his head.

      “We shall teach her that way, that is all. It has taken fifteen hundred years to rule with a monarchy; in one hundred the Republic will be founded to endure—why not as long?”

      “The King will resist; the nobility fly to arms; and then what will you do?”

      “We will make a revolution before we have the Republic.”

      “It will be awful to do that, Joseph,” said Gilbert, hanging his head.

      “Awful indeed, if we meet many such as you on the road.”

      “I am not strong, but honest,” said the doctor.

      “That is worse: so I want to bring you over.”

      “I am convinced—not that I shall prevent you in your work, but will stay you.”

      “You are mad, Gilbert; you do not understand the mission of France in Europe. It is the brain of the Old World, and must think freely so that the world will be the happier for its thought. Do you know what overthrew the Bastile?”

      “The people.”

      “No: public opinion. You are taking the effect for the cause.”

      “For five hundred years they have been imprisoning nobles in the Bastile and it stood. But the mad idea struck an insane monarch one day to lock up thought—the spirit which must be free, and requires space unto immensity, and crack! it burst the walls and the mob surged in at the breach.”

      “True enough,” mused the younger man.

      “Twenty-six years ago, Voltaire wrote to Chauvelin: ‘All that I see is sowing Revolution round us, and it will inevitably come though I shall not have the bliss to see the harvest. The French are sometimes slow to come into the battle but they get there before the fight is over. Light is so spread from one to another, that it will burst forth in a mass soon, and then there will be a fine explosion. The young men are happy for they will behold splendors. What do you say about the flare-ups of yesterday and what is going on to-day?'”

      “Terrible!”

      “And what you have beheld in the way of events?”

      “Dreadful!”

      “We are only at the beginning.”

      “Prophet of evil!”

      “For instance, I was at the house of a man of merit, a doctor of medicine and a philanthropist: what do you think he was busy over?”

      “Seeking the remedy for some great disease.”

      “You have it. He is trying to cure, not death, but life.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Leaving epigrams aside, I mean that there not being means enough for quitting life, he is inventing a very ingenious machine which he reckons to present to his fellow countrymen, to put fifty or eighty persons to death in an hour. Well, my dear Gilbert, do you believe that so human a philanthropist, so distinguished a physician as Dr. Louis Guillotin, would busy himself about such an instrument unless he felt the want of it?

      “I know that this is not so much a novelty as a machine forgotten, as a proof of which I showed it as an image in a glass of water to Marie Antoinette. She was then espoused to the Dauphin of France, now its sovereign, and it was down at Taverney where you were a dependent. The old baron was alive then, and the lady of the manor was Mdlle. Andrea.”

      “Ah,” sighed Gilbert at this reminder of his boyhood.

      “But at the first you had eyes only for the servant-maid, Nicole, afterwards Olive Legay, as the Dauphiness, to whom she bore an amazing resemblance by the bye, is the Queen of France. Well I repeat that the future Queen was shown by me this instrument to which I shall suggest no name, though the olden ones are the Maiden, the Widow and the Mannaya in my country. The thing so alarmed her that she swooned dead away. It was in limbo at the era, but you shall see it at work presently if it be successful; and then you must be blind if you do not spy the hand of heaven in it all, it being foreseen that the time would come when the headsman would have his hands too full and that a new method must be devised.”