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- Author: Rafael Sabatini
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“Summon the gentlemen of your Chamber, monsieur,” said he, “and you shall hear all.”
“So be it.”
A word, and forth they came to crowd upon the steps, but leaving clear the topmost step and a half-moon space in the middle.
To the spot so indicated, Andre-Louis now advanced very deliberately. He took his stand there, dominating the entire assembly. He removed his hat, and launched the opening bombshell of that address which is historic, marking as it does one of the great stages of France’s progress towards revolution.
“People of this great city of Nantes, I have come to summon you to arms!”
In the amazed and rather scared silence that followed he surveyed them for a moment before resuming.
“I am a delegate of the people of Rennes, charged to announce to you what is taking place, and to invite you in this dreadful hour of our country’s peril to rise and march to her defence.”
“Name! Your name!” a voice shouted, and instantly the cry was taken up by others, until the multitude rang with the question.
He could not answer that excited mob as he had answered the president. It was necessary to compromise, and he did so, happily. “My name,” said he, “is Omnes Omnibus - all for all. Let that suffice you now. I am a herald, a mouthpiece, a voice; no more. I come to announce to you that since the privileged orders, assembled for the States of Brittany in Rennes, resisted your will - our will - despite the King’s plain hint to them, His Majesty has dissolved the States.”
There was a burst of delirious applause. Men laughed and shouted, and cries of “Vive le Roi!” rolled forth like thunder. Andre-Louis waited, and gradually the preternatural gravity of his countenance came to be observed, and to beget the suspicion that there might be more to follow. Gradually silence was restored, and at last Andre Louis was able to proceed.
“You rejoice too soon. Unfortunately, the nobles, in their insolent arrogance, have elected to ignore the royal dissolution, and in despite of it persist in sitting and in conducting matters as seems good to them.”
A silence of utter dismay greeted that disconcerting epilogue to the announcement that had been so rapturously received. Andre-Louis continued after a moment’s pause:
“So that these men who were already rebels against the people, rebels, against justice and equity, rebels against humanity itself, are now also rebels against their King. Sooner than yield an inch of the unconscionable privileges by which too long already they have flourished, to the misery of a whole nation, they will make a mock of royal authority, hold up the King himself to contempt. They are determined to prove that there is no real sovereignty in France but the sovereignty of their own parasitic faineantise.”
There was a faint splutter of applause, but the majority of the audience remained silent, waiting.
“This is no new thing. Always has it been the same. No minister in the last ten years, who, seeing the needs and perils of the State, counselled the measures that we now demand as the only means of arresting our motherland in its ever-quickening progress to the abyss, but found himself as a consequence cast out of office by the influence which Privilege brought to bear against him. Twice already has M. Necker been called to the ministry, to be twice dismissed when his insistent counsels of reform threatened the privileges of clergy and nobility. For the third time now has he been called to office, and at last it seems we are to have States General in spite of Privilege. But what the privileged orders can no longer prevent, they are determined to stultify. Since it is now a settled thing that these States General are to meet, at least the nobles and the clergy will see to it - unless we take measures to prevent them - by packing the Third Estate with their own creatures, and denying it all effective representation, that they convert. the States General into an instrument of their own will for the perpetuation of the abuses by which they live. To achieve this end they will stop at nothing. They have flouted the authority of the King, and they are silencing by assassination those who raise their voices to condemn them. Yesterday in Rennes two young men who addressed the people as I am addressing you were done to death in the streets by assassins at the instigation of the nobility. Their blood cries out for vengeance.”
Beginning in a sullen mutter, the indignation that moved his hearers swelled up to express itself in a roar of anger.
“Citizens of Nantes, the motherland is in peril. Let us march to her defence. Let us proclaim it to the world that we recognize that the measures to liberate the Third Estate from the slavery in which for centuries it has groaned find only obstacles in those orders whose phrenetic egotism sees in the tears and suffering of the unfortunate an odious tribute which they would pass on to their generations still unborn. Realizing from the barbarity of the means employed by our enemies to perpetuate our oppression that we have everything to fear from the aristocracy they would set up as a constitutional principle for the governing of France, let us declare ourselves at once enfranchised from it.
“The establishment of liberty and equality should be the aim of every citizen member of the Third Estate; and to this end we should stand indivisibly united, especially the young and vigorous, especially those who have had the good fortune to be born late enough to be able to gather for themselves the precious fruits of the philosophy of this eighteenth century.”
Acclamations broke out unstintedly now. He had caught them in the snare of his oratory. And he pressed his advantage instantly.
“Let us all swear,” he cried in a great voice, “to raise up in the name of humanity and of liberty a rampart against our enemies, to oppose to their bloodthirsty covetousness the calm perseverance of men whose cause is just. And let us protest here and in advance against any tyrannical decrees that should declare us seditious when we have none but pure and just intentions. Let us make oath upon the honour of our motherland that should any of us be seized by an unjust tribunal, intending against us one of those acts termed of political expediency - which are, in effect, but acts of despotism - let us swear, I say, to give a full expression to the strength that is in us and do that in self-defence which nature, courage, and despair dictate to us.”
Loud and long rolled the applause that greeted his conclusion, and he observed with satisfaction and even some inward grim amusement that the wealthy merchants who had been congregated upon the steps, and who now came crowding about him to shake him by the hand and to acclaim him, were not merely participants in, but the actual leaders of, this delirium of enthusiasm.
It confirmed him, had he needed confirmation, in his conviction that just as the philosophies upon which this new movement was based had their source in thinkers extracted from the bourgeoisie, so the need to adopt those philosophies to the practical purposes of life was most acutely felt at present by those bourgeois who found themselves debarred by Privilege from the expansion their wealth permitted them. If it might be said of Andre-Louis that he had that day lighted the torch of the Revolution in Nantes, it might with even greater truth be said that the torch itself was supplied by the opulent bourgeoisie.
I need not dwell at any length upon the sequel. It is a matter of history how that oath which Omnes Omnibus administered to the citizens of Nantes formed the backbone of the formal protest which they drew up and signed in their thousands. Nor were the results of that powerful protest - which, after all, might already be said to harmonize with the expressed will of the sovereign himself - long delayed. Who shall say how far it may have strengthened the hand of Necker, when on the 27th of that same month of November he compelled the Council to adopt the most significant and comprehensive of all those measures to which clergy and nobility had refused their consent? On that date was published the royal decree ordaining that the deputies to be elected to the States General should number at least one thousand, and that the deputies of the Third Estate should be fully representative by numbering as many as the deputies of clergy and nobility together.
Dusk of the following day was falling when the homing Andre-Louis approached Gavrillac. Realizing fully what a hue and cry there would presently be for the apostle of revolution who had summoned the people of Nantes to arms, he desired as far as possible to conceal the fact that he had been in that maritime city. Therefore he made a wide detour, crossing the river at Bruz, and recrossing it a little above Chavagne, so as to approach Gavrillac from the north, and create the impression that he was returning from Rennes, whither he was known to have gone two days ago.
Within a mile or so of the village he caught in the fading light his first glimpse of a figure on horseback pacing slowly towards him. But it was not until they had come within a few yards of each other, and he observed that this cloaked figure was leaning forward to peer at him, that he took much notice of it. And then he found himself challenged almost at once by a woman’s voice.
“It is you, Andre - at last!”
He drew rein, mildly surprised, to be assailed by another question, impatiently, anxiously asked.
“Where have you been?”
“Where have I been, Cousin Aline? Oh… seeing the world.”
“I have been patrolling this road since noon to-day waiting for you.” She spoke breathlessly, in haste to explain. “A troop of the marechaussee from Rennes descended upon Gavrillac this morning in quest of you. They turned the chateau and the village inside out, and at last discovered that you were due to return with a horse hired from the Breton arme. So they have taken up their quarters at the inn to wait for you. I have been here all the afternoon on the lookout to warn you against walking into that trap.”
“My dear Aline! That I should have been the cause of so much concern and trouble!”
“Never mind that. It is not important.”
“On the contrary; it is the most important part of what you tell me. It is the rest that is unimportant.”
“Do you realize that they have come to arrest you?” she asked him, with increasing impatience. “You are wanted for sedition, and upon a warrant from M. de Lesdiguieres.”
“Sedition?” quoth he, and his thoughts flew to that business at Nantes. It was impossible they could have had news of it in Rennes and acted upon it in so short a time.
“Yes, sedition. The sedition of that wicked speech of yours at Rennes on Wednesday.”
“Oh, that!” said he. “Pooh!” His note of relief might have told her, had she been more attentive, that he had to fear the consequences of a greater wickedness committed since. “Why, that was nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I almost suspect that the real intentions of these gentlemen of the marechaussee have been misunderstood. Most probably they have
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