For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at,and adorned with every device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could achieve,were, in truth, not a sound business; considered with any reference to the scarecrows in the rags and nightcaps elsewhere (and not so far off,either, but that the watching towers of Notre Dame, almost equidistant from the two extremes,could see them both), they would have been an exceedingly uncomfortable business--if that could have been anybody’s business,at the house of Monseigneur. Military officers destitute of military knowledge;naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs;brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues,and looser lives; all totally unfit for their several callings,all lying horribly in pretending to belong to them,but all nearly or remotely of the order of Monseigneur,and therefore foisted on all public employments from which anything was to be got;these were to be told off by the score and the score.People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State,yet equally unconnected with anything that was real,or with lives passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end,were no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed,smiled upon their courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur.Projectors who had discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the State was touched,except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to root out a single sin,poured their distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of,at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words,and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with,talked with Unbelieving Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals,at this wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding,which was at that remarkable time--and has been since--to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural subject of human interest,were in the most exemplary state of exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur.Such homes had these various notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris,that the spies among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur--forming a goodly half of the polite company--would have found it hard to discover among the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of bringing a troublesome creature into this world--which does not go far towards the realisation of the name of mother--there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty.
The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon Monseigneur.In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional people who had had, for a few years,some vague misgiving in them that things in general were going rather wrong.As a promising way of setting them right,half of the half-dozen had become members of a fantastic sect of Convulsionists,and were even then considering within themselves whether they should foam, rage, roar,and turn cataleptic on the spot--thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the Future,for Monseigneur’s guidance. Besides these Dervishes,were other three who had rushed into another sect,which mended matters with a jargon about “the Centre of Truth:” holding that Man had got out of the Centre of Truth--which did not need much demonstration--but had not got out of the Circumference,and that he was to be kept from flying out of the Circumference,and was even to be shoved back into the Centre, by fasting and seeing of spirits. Among these,accordingly, much discoursing with spirits went on--and it did a world of good which never became manifest.
But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of Monseigneur were perfectly dressed.If the Day of Judgment had only been ascertained to be a dress day,everybody there would have been eternally correct.Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of hair,such delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant swords to look at,and such delicate honour to the sense of smell, would surely keep anything going,for ever and ever. The exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they languidly moved;these golden fetters rang like precious little bells; and what with that ringing,and with the rustle of silk and brocade and fine linen,there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and his devouring hunger far away.
Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping all things in their places.Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball that was never to leave off.From the Palace of the Tuileries, through Monseigneur and the whole Court, through the Chambers,the Tribunals of Justice, and all society (except the scarecrows),the Fancy Ball descended to the Common Executioner: who, in pursuance of the charm,was required to officiate “frizzled, powdered, in a gold-laced coat, pumps,and white silk stockings.” At the gallows and the wheel--the axe was a rarity--Monsieur Paris,as it was the episcopal mode among his brother Professors of the provinces, Monsieur Orleans,and the rest, to call him, presided in this dainty dress.And who among the company at Monseigneur’s reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year of our Lord,could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped,and white-silk stockinged, would see the very stars out!
Monseigneur having eased his four men of their burdens and taken his chocolate,caused the doors of the Holiest of Holiests to be thrown open, and issued forth. Then,what submission, what cringing and fawning, what servility, what abject humiliation!As to bowing down in body and spirit, nothing in that way was left for Heaven--which may have been one among other reasons why the worshippers of Monseigneur never troubled it.
Bestowing a word of promise here and a smile there,a whisper on one happy slave and a wave of the hand on another,Monseigneur affably passed through his rooms to the remote region of the Circumference of Truth.There, Monseigneur turned, and came back again,and so in due course of time got himself shut up in his sanctuary by the chocolate sprites, and was seen no more.
The show being over, the flutter in the air became quite a little storm,and the precious little bells went ringing downstairs.There was soon but one person left of all the crowd, and he,with his hat under his arm and his snuff-box in his hand,slowly passed among the mirrors on his way out.
“I devote you,” said this person, stopping at the last door on his way,and turning in the direction of the sanctuary, “to the Devil!”
With that, he shook the snuff from his fingers as if he had shaken the dust from his feet, and quietly walked downstairs.
He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner,and with a face like a fine mask. A face of a transparent paleness;every feature in it clearly defined; one set expression on it. The nose,beautifully formed otherwise, was very slightly pinched at the top of each nostril.In those two compressions, or dints, the only little change that the face ever showed, resided.They persisted in changing colour sometimes,and they would be occasionally dilated and contracted by something like a faint pulsation; then,they gave a look of treachery, and cruelty, to the whole countenance. Examined with attention,its capacity of helping such a look was to be found in the line of the mouth,and the lines of the orbits of the eyes, being much too horizontal and thin; still,in the effect of the face made, it was a handsome face, and a remarkable one.
Its owner went downstairs into the courtyard, got into his carriage, and drove away.Not many people had talked with him at the reception; he had stood in a little space apart,and Monseigneur might have been warmer in his manner. It appeared, under the circumstances,rather agreeable to him to see the common people dispersed before his horses,and often barely escaping from being run down. His man drove as if he were charging an enemy,and the furious recklessness of the man brought no check into the face, or to the lips,of the master. The complaint had sometimes made itself audible,even in that deaf city and dumb age, that, in the narrow streets without footways,the fierce patrician custom of hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a barbarous manner.But, few cared enough for that to think of it a second time, and, in this matter, as in all others,the common wretches were left to get out of their difficulties as they could.
With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of consideration not easy to be understood in these days,the carriage dashed through streets and swept round corners, with women screaming before it,and men clutching each other and clutching children out of its way. At last,swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its wheels came to a sickening little jolt,and there was a loud cry from a number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged.
But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would not have stopped;carriages were often known to drive on, and leave their wounded behind, and why not?But the frightened valet had got down in a hurry,and there were twenty hands at the horses’ bridles.
“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking out.
A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of the horses,and had laid it on the basement of the fountain, and was down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.
“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it is a child.”
“Why does he make that abominable noise?Is it his child?”
“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis--it is a pity--yes.”
The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where it was,into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly got up from the ground,and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.
“Killed!” shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both arms at their length above his head, and staring at him. “Dead!”
The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the Marquis.There was nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness and eagerness;there was no visible menacing or anger. Neither did the people say anything; after the first cry,they had been silent, and they remained so. The voice of the submissive man who had spoken,was flat and tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over them all,as if they had been mere rats come out of their holes.
He took out his purse.
“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children.One or the other of you is for ever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See!Give him that.”
He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up,and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell.The tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”
He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest made way. On seeing him,the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder, sobbing and crying, and pointing to the fountain,where some women were stooping over the motionless bundle, and moving gently about it.They were as silent, however, as the men.
“I know all, I know all,” said the last comer. “Be a brave man, my Gaspard!It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to live.It has died in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour as happily?”
“You are a philosopher, you there,” said the Marquis, smiling. “How do they call you?”
“They call me Defarge.”
“Of what trade?”
“Monsieur the Marquis, vendor of wine.”
“Pick up that, philosopher and vendor of wine,” said the Marquis, throwing him another gold coin,“and spend it as you will. The horses there; are they right?”
Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time,Monsieur the Marquis leaned back in his seat,and was just being driven away with the air of a gentleman who had accidentally broke some common thing,and had paid for it, and could afford to pay for it;when his ease was suddenly disturbed by a coin flying into his carriage, and ringing on its floor.
“Hold!” said Monsieur the Marquis. “Hold the horses!Who threw that?”
He looked to the spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had stood, a moment before;but the wretched father was grovelling on his face on the pavement in that spot,and the figure that stood beside him was the figure of a dark stout woman, knitting.
“You dogs!” said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front, except as to the spots on his nose:“I would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth.If I knew which rascal threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he should be crushed under the wheels.”
So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of what such a man could do to them,within the law and beyond it, that not a voice, or a hand, or even an eye was raised.Among the men, not one. But the woman who stood knitting looked up steadily,and looked the Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it;his contemptuous eyes passed over her, and over all the other rats;and he leaned back in his seat again, and gave the word “Go on!”
He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick succession; the Minister,the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera,the Comedy, the whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous flow, came whirling by.The rats had crept out of their holes to look on, and they remained looking on for hours;soldiers and police often passing between them and the spectacle,and making a barrier behind which they slunk, and through which they peeped.The father had long ago taken up his bundle and bidden himself away with it,when the women who had tended the bundle while it lay on the base of the fountain,sat there watching the running of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball--when the one woman who had stood conspicuous,knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness of Fate. The water of the fountain ran,the swift river ran, the day ran into evening,so much life in the city ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited for no man,the rats were sleeping close together in their dark holes again,the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all things ran their course.
CHAPTER VIII. Monseigneur in the Country
A beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it, but not abundant.Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor peas and beans,patches of most coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat. On inanimate nature,as on the men and women who cultivated it,a prevalent tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly--a dejected disposition to give up, and wither away.
Monsieur the Marquis in his travelling carriage (which might have been lighter),conducted by four post-horses and two postilions, fagged up a steep hill.A blush on the countenance of Monsieur the Marquis was no impeachment of his high breeding;it was not from within; it was occasioned by an external circumstance beyond his control--the setting sun.
The sunset struck so brilliantly into the travelling carriage when it gained the hill-top,that its occupant was steeped in crimson. “It will die out,” said Monsieur the Marquis, glancing at his hands, “directly.”
In effect, the sun was so low that it dipped at the moment.When the heavy drag had been adjusted to the wheel, and the carriage slid down hill,with a cinderous smell, in a cloud of dust, the red glow departed quickly;the sun and the Marquis going down together, there was no glow left when the drag was taken off.
But, there remained a broken country, bold and open, a little village at the bottom of the hill,a broad sweep and rise beyond it, a church-tower, a windmill, a forest for the chase,and a crag with a fortress on it used as a prison.Round upon all these darkening objects as the night drew on, the Marquis looked,with the air of one who was coming near home.
The village had its one poor street, with its poor brewery, poor tannery, poor tavern,poor stable-yard for relays of post-horses, poor fountain, all usual poor appointments.It had its poor people too. All its people were poor, and many of them were sitting at their doors,shredding spare onions and the like for supper, while many were at the fountain, washing leaves,and grasses, and any such small yieldings of the earth that could be eaten.Expressive signs of what made them poor, were not wanting; the tax for the state,the tax for the church, the tax for the lord, tax local and tax general,were to be paid here and to be paid there, according to solemn inscription in the little village,until the wonder was, that there was any village left unswallowed.
Few children were to be seen, and no dogs. As to the men and women,their choice on earth was stated in the prospect--Life on the lowest terms that could sustain it,down in the little village under the mill;or captivity and Death in the dominant prison on the crag.
Heralded by a courier in advance, and by the cracking of his postilions’ whips,which twined snake-like about their heads in the evening air, as if he came attended by the Furies,Monsieur the Marquis drew up in his travelling carriage at the posting-house gate.It was hard by the fountain, and the peasants suspended their operations to look at him.He looked at them, and saw in them, without knowing it,the slow sure filing down of misery-worn face and figure,that was to make the meagreness of Frenchmen an English superstition which should survive the truth through the best part of a hundred years.
Monsieur the Marquis cast his eyes over the submissive faces that drooped before him,as the like of himself had drooped before Monseigneur of the Court--only the difference was,that these faces drooped merely to suffer and not to propitiate--when a grizzled mender of the roads joined the group.
“Bring me hither that fellow!” said the Marquis to the courier.
The fellow was brought, cap in hand, and the other fellows closed round to look and listen,in the manner of the people at the Paris fountain.
“I passed you on the road?”
“Monseigneur, it is true. I had the honour of being passed on the road.”
“Coming up the hill, and at the top of the hill, both?”
“Monseigneur, it is true.”
“What did you look at, so fixedly?”
“Monseigneur, I looked at the man.”
He stooped a little, and with his tattered blue cap pointed under the carriage.All his fellows stooped to look under the carriage.
“What man, pig?And why look there?”
“Pardon, Monseigneur; he swung by the chain of the shoe--the drag.”
“Who?” demanded the traveller.
“Monseigneur, the man.”
“May the Devil carry away these idiots!How do you call the man?You know all the men of this part of the country. Who was he?”
“Your clemency, Monseigneur!He was not of this part of the country. Of all the days of my life, I never saw him.”
“Swinging by the chain?To be suffocated?”
“With your gracious permission, that was the wonder of it, Monseigneur. His head hanging over--like this!”
He turned himself sideways to the carriage, and leaned back, with his face thrown up to the sky,and his head hanging down; then recovered himself, fumbled with his cap, and made a bow.
“What was he like?”
“Monseigneur, he was whiter than the miller. All covered with dust, white as a spectre, tall as a spectre!”
The picture produced an immense sensation in the little crowd; but all eyes,without comparing notes with other eyes, looked at Monsieur the Marquis. Perhaps,to observe whether he had any spectre on his conscience.
“Truly, you did well,” said the Marquis,felicitously sensible that such vermin were not to ruffle him,“to see a thief accompanying my carriage, and not open that great mouth of yours. Bah!Put him aside, Monsieur Gabelle!”
Monsieur Gabelle was the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary united;he had come out with great obsequiousness to assist at this examination,and had held the examined by the drapery of his arm in an official manner.
“Bah!Go aside!” said Monsieur Gabelle.
“Lay hands on this stranger if he seeks to lodge in your village to-night,and be sure that his business is honest, Gabelle.”
“Monseigneur, I am flattered to devote myself to your orders.”
“Did he run away, fellow?--where is that Accursed?”
The accursed was already under the carriage with some half-dozen particular friends,pointing out the chain with his blue cap.Some half-dozen other particular friends promptly hauled him out,and presented him breathless to Monsieur the Marquis.
“Did the man run away, Dolt, when we stopped for the drag?”
“Monseigneur, he precipitated himself over the hill-side, head first, as a person plunges into the river.”
“See to it, Gabelle. Go on!”
The half-dozen who were peering at the chain were still among the wheels, like sheep;the wheels turned so suddenly that they were lucky to save their skins and bones;they had very little else to save, or they might not have been so fortunate.
The burst with which the carriage started out of the village and up the rise beyond,was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. Gradually, it subsided to a foot pace,swinging and lumbering upward among the many sweet scents of a summer night. The postilions,with a thousand gossamer gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies,quietly mended the points to the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses;the courier was audible, trotting on ahead into the dull distance.
At the steepest point of the hill there was a little burial-ground,with a Cross and a new large figure of Our Saviour on it; it was a poor figure in wood,done by some inexperienced rustic carver,but he had studied the figure from the life--his own life,maybe--for it was dreadfully spare and thin.
To this distressful emblem of a great distress that had long been growing worse,and was not at its worst, a woman was kneeling. She turned her head as the carriage came up to her,rose quickly, and presented herself at the carriage-door.
“It is you, Monseigneur!Monseigneur, a petition.”
With an exclamation of impatience, but with his unchangeable face, Monseigneur looked out.
“How, then!What is it?Always petitions!”
“Monseigneur. For the love of the great God!My husband, the forester.”
“What of your husband, the forester?Always the same with you people. He cannot pay something?”
“He has paid all, Monseigneur. He is dead.”
“Well!He is quiet. Can I restore him to you?”
“Alas, no, Monseigneur!But he lies yonder, under a little heap of poor grass.”
“Well?”
“Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps of poor grass?”
“Again, well?”
She looked an old woman, but was young. Her manner was one of passionate grief;by turns she clasped her veinous and knotted hands together with wild energy,and laid one of them on the carriage-door--tenderly, caressingly, as if it had been a human breast,and could be expected to feel the appealing touch.
“Monseigneur, hear me!Monseigneur, hear my petition!My husband died of want; so many die of want; so many more will die of want.”
“Again, well?Can I feed them?”
“Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I don’t ask it. My petition is,that a morsel of stone or wood, with my husband’s name,may be placed over him to show where he lies. Otherwise, the place will be quickly forgotten,it will never be found when I am dead of the same malady,I shall be laid under some other heap of poor grass. Monseigneur, they are so many,they increase so fast, there is so much want. Monseigneur!Monseigneur!”
The valet had put her away from the door, the carriage had broken into a brisk trot,the postilions had quickened the pace, she was left far behind, and Monseigneur,again escorted by the Furies, was rapidly diminishing the league or two of distance that remained between him and his chateau.
The sweet scents of the summer night rose all around him, and rose, as the rain falls, impartially,on the dusty, ragged, and toil-worn group at the fountain not far away;to whom the mender of roads, with the aid of the blue cap without which he was nothing,still enlarged upon his man like a spectre, as long as they could bear it. By degrees,as they could bear no more, they dropped off one by one, and lights twinkled in little casements;which lights, as the casements darkened, and more stars came out,seemed to have shot up into the sky instead of having been extinguished.
The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and of many over-hanging trees,was upon Monsieur the Marquis by that time;and the shadow was exchanged for the light of a flambeau, as his carriage stopped,and the great door of his chateau was opened to him.
“Monsieur Charles, whom I expect; is he arrived from England?”
“Monseigneur, not yet.”
CHAPTER IX. The Gorgon’s Head
It was a heavy mass of building, that chateau of Monsieur the Marquis,with a large stone courtyard before it,and two stone sweeps of staircase meeting in a stone terrace before the principal door.A stony business altogether, with heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and stone flowers,and stone faces of men, and stone heads of lions, in all directions.As if the Gorgon’s head had surveyed it, when it was finished, two centuries ago.
Up the broad flight of shallow steps, Monsieur the Marquis, flambeau preceded,went from his carriage, sufficiently disturbing the darkness to elicit loud remonstrance from an owl in the roof of the great pile of stable building away among the trees. All else was so quiet, that the flambeau carried up the steps, and the other flambeau held at the great door, burnt as if they were in a close room of state, instead of being in the open night-air. Other sound than the owl’s voice there was none, save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.
The great door clanged behind him, and Monsieur the Marquis crossed a hall grim with certain old boar-spears,swords, and knives of the chase; grimmer with certain heavy riding-rods and riding-whips,of which many a peasant, gone to his benefactor Death, had felt the weight when his lord was angry.
Avoiding the larger rooms, which were dark and made fast for the night, Monsieur the Marquis,with his flambeau-bearer going on before, went up the staircase to a door in a corridor.This thrown open, admitted him to his own private apartment of three rooms:his bed-chamber and two others. High vaulted rooms with cool uncarpeted floors,great dogs upon the hearths for the burning of wood in winter time,and all luxuries befitting the state of a marquis in a luxurious age and country.The fashion of the last Louis but one, of the line that was never to break--the fourteenth Louis--was conspicuous in their rich furniture;but, it was diversified by many objects that were illustrations of old pages in the history of France.
A supper-table was laid for two, in the third of the rooms; a round room,in one of the chateau’s four extinguisher-topped towers. A small lofty room,with its window wide open, and the wooden jalousie-blinds closed,so that the dark night only showed in slight horizontal lines of black,alternating with their broad lines of stone colour.
“My nephew,” said the Marquis, glancing at the supper preparation; “they said he was not arrived.”
Nor was he; but, he had been expected with Monseigneur.
“Ah!It is not probable he will arrive to-night; nevertheless, leave the table as it is.I shall be ready in a quarter of an hour.”
In a quarter of an hour Monseigneur was ready,and sat down alone to his sumptuous and choice supper. His chair was opposite to the window,and he had taken his soup, and was raising his glass of Bordeaux to his lips, when he put it down.
“What is that?” he calmly asked, looking with attention at the horizontal lines of black and stone colour.
“Monseigneur?That?”
“Outside the blinds. Open the blinds.”
It was done.
“Well?”
“Monseigneur, it is nothing. The trees and the night are all that are here.”
The servant who spoke, had thrown the blinds wide, had looked out into the vacant darkness,and stood with that blank behind him, looking round for instructions.
“Good,” said the imperturbable master. “Close them again.”
That was done too, and the Marquis went on with his supper. He was half way through it,when he again stopped with his glass in his hand, hearing the sound of wheels. It came on briskly,and came up to the front of the chateau.
“Ask who is arrived.”
It was the nephew of Monseigneur. He had been some few leagues behind Monseigneur,early in the afternoon. He had diminished the distance rapidly,but not so rapidly as to come up with Monseigneur on the road. He had heard of Monseigneur,at the posting-houses, as being before him.
He was to be told (said Monseigneur) that supper awaited him then and there,and that he was prayed to come to it. In a little while he came.He had been known in England as Charles Darnay.