Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini (great books to read .txt) 📖

M. Le Chapelier was abovestairs with friends. The waiter desired to serve the gentleman, but hesitated to break in upon the assembly in which M. le Depute found himself.

Andre-Louis gave him a piece of silver to encourage him to make the attempt. Then he sat down at a marble-topped table by the window looking out over the wide tree-encircled square. There, in that common-room of the caf�, deserted at this hour of mid-afternoon, the great man came to him. Less than a year ago he had yielded precedence to Andre-Louis in a matter of delicate leadership; to-day he stood on the heights, one of the great leaders of the Nation in travail, and Andre-Louis was deep down in the shadows of the general mass.

The thought was in the minds of both as they scanned each other, each noting in the other the marked change that a few months had wrought. In Le Chapelier, Andre-Louis observed certain heightened refinements of dress that went with certain subtler refinements of countenance. He was thinner than of old, his face was pale and there was a weariness in the eyes that considered his visitor through a gold-rimmed spy-glass. In Andre-Louis those jaded but quick-moving eyes of the Breton deputy noted changes even more marked. The almost constant swordmanship of these last months had given Andre-Louis a grace of movement, a poise, and a curious, indefinable air of dignity, of command. He seemed taller by virtue of this, and he was dressed with an elegance which if quiet was none the less rich. He wore a small silver-hilted sword, and wore it as if used to it, and his black hair that Le Chapelier had never seen other than fluttering lank about his bony cheeks was glossy now and gathered into a club. Almost he had the air of a petit-maitre.

In both, however, the changes were purely superficial, as each was soon to reveal to the other. Le Chapelier was ever the same direct and downright Breton, abrupt of manner and of speech. He stood smiling a moment in mingled surprise and pleasure; then opened wide his arms. They embraced under the awe-stricken gaze of the waiter, who at once effaced himself.

“Andre-Louis, my friend! Whence do you drop?”

“We drop from above. I come from below to survey at close quarters one who is on the heights.”

“On the heights! But that you willed it so, it is yourself might now be standing in my place.”

“I have a poor head for heights, and I find the atmosphere too rarefied. Indeed, you look none too well on it yourself, Isaac. You are pale.”

“The Assembly was in session all last night. That is all. These damned Privileged multiply our difficulties. They will do so until we decree their abolition.”

They sat down. “Abolition! You contemplate so much? Not that you surprise me. You have always been an extremist.”

“I contemplate it that I may save them. I seek to abolish them officially, so as to save them from abolition of another kind at the hands of a people they exasperate.”

“I see. And the King?”

“The King is the incarnation of the Nation. We shall deliver him together with the Nation from the bondage of Privilege. Our constitution will accomplish it. You agree?”

Andre-Louis shrugged. “Does it matter? I am a dreamer in politics, not a man of action. Until lately I have been very moderate; more moderate than you think. But now almost I am a republican. I have been watching, and I have perceived that this King is - just nothing, a puppet who dances according to the hand that pulls the string.”

“This King, you say? What other king is possible? You are surely not of those who weave dreams about Orleans? He has a sort of party, a following largely recruited by the popular hatred of the Queen and the known fact that she hates him. There are some who have thought of making him regent, some even more; Robespierre is of the number.”

“Who?” asked Andre-Louis, to whom the name was unknown.

“Robespierre - a preposterous little lawyer who represents Arras, a shabby, clumsy, timid dullard, who will make speeches through his nose to which nobody listens - an ultra-royalist whom the royalists and the Orleanists are using for their own ends. He has pertinacity, and he insists upon being heard. He may be listened to some day. But that he, or the others, will ever make anything of Orleans… pish! Orleans himself may desire it, but the man is a eunuch in crime; he would, but he can’t. The phrase is Mirabeau’s.”

He broke off to demand Andre-Louis’ news of himself.

“You did not treat me as a friend when you wrote to me,” he complained. “You gave me no clue to your whereabouts; you represented yourself as on the verge of destitution and withheld from me the means to come to your assistance. I have been troubled in mind about you, Andre. Yet to judge by your appearance I might have spared myself that. You seem prosperous, assured. Tell me of it.”

Andre-Louis told him frankly all that there was to tell. “Do you know that you are an amazement to me?” said the deputy. “From the robe to the buskin, and now from the buskin to the sword! What will be the end of you, I wonder?”

“The gallows, probably.”

“Pish! Be serious. Why not the toga of the senator in senatorial France? It might be yours now if you had willed it so.”

“The surest way to the gallows of all,” laughed Andre-Louis.

At the moment Le Chapelier manifested impatience. I wonder did the phrase cross his mind that day four years later when himself he rode in the death-cart to the Greve.

“We are sixty-six Breton deputies in the Assembly. Should a vacancy occur, will you act as suppleant? A word from me together with the influence of your name in Rennes and Nantes, and the thing is done.”

Andre-Louis laughed outright. “Do you know, Isaac, that I never meet you but you seek to thrust me into politics?”

“Because you have a gift for politics. You were born for politics.”

“Ah, yes - Scaramouche in real life. I’ve played it on the stage. Let that suffice. Tell me, Isaac, what news of my old friend, La Tour d’Azyr?”

“He is here in Versailles, damn him - a thorn in the flesh of the Assembly. They’ve burnt his chateau at La Tour d’Azyr. Unfortunately he wasn’t in it at the time. The flames haven’t even singed his insolence. He dreams that when this philosophic aberration is at an end, there will be serfs to rebuild it for him.”

“So there has been trouble in Brittany?” Andre-Louis had become suddenly grave, his thoughts swinging to Gavrillac.

“An abundance of it, and elsewhere too. Can you wonder? These delays at such a time, with famine in the land? Chateaux have been going up in smoke during the last fortnight. The peasants took their cue from the Parisians, and treated every castle as a Bastille. Order is being restored, there as here, and they are quieter now.”

“What of Gavrillac? Do you know?”

“I believe all to be well. M. de Kercadiou was not a Marquis de La Tour d’Azyr. He was in sympathy with his people. It is not likely that they would injure Gavrillac. But don’t you correspond with your godfather?”

“In the circumstances - no. What you tell me would make it now more difficult than ever, for he must account me one of those who helped to light the torch that has set fire to so much belonging to his class. Ascertain for me that all is well, and let me know.”

“I will, at once.”

At parting, when Andre-Louis was on the point of stepping into his cabriolet to return to Paris, he sought information on another matter.

“Do you happen to know if M. de La Tour d’Azyr has married?” he asked.

“I don’t; which really means that he hasn’t. One would have heard of it in the case of that exalted Privileged.”

“To be sure.” Andre-Louis spoke indifferently. “Au revoir, Isaac! You’ll come and see me - 13 Rue du Hasard. Come soon.”

“As soon and as often as my duties will allow. They keep me chained here at present.”

“Poor slave of duty with your gospel of liberty!”

“True! And because of that I will come. I have a duty to Brittany: to make Omnes Omnibus one of her representatives in the National Assembly.”

“That is a duty you will oblige me by neglecting,” laughed Andre-Louis, and drove away.