Part 2

From the Quai de l’Horloge came the first roar of the mob, as rabid to flesh its teeth in the accuser as it had ever been in the accused. Already, as the Pont Neuf was reached, a running, howling _valetaille_ of blackguards and prostitutes was travelling with the procession. Lumbering onwards, between ranks of many-windowed houses alive with screaming faces and waving hands, the carts traversed the rues la Monoie and du Roule, and turned into the long stretch of the rue St. Honoré, which ended only at the bend into the great square of the guillotine.

They cursed him all the way; he cursed them back. The habit of his lips spat venom, while his brain ignored and his vision overlooked them.

“Where are thy batches now, Antoine?” they screamed.

“Ravening curs!” he thundered; “is thy bread cheaper lacking them?”

All the time his eyes were going with the running crowd, searching it, beating it like covert, hunting for something on which they hungered to fasten. And suddenly they found it--_the figure of a little withered old woman, bearing a gross green umbrella in her hand_.

She was there in a moment, moving in pace with the carts, a dead twig borne on the living stream, now afloat, now under, but always reappearing--bobbing out grotesque and vital, and dancing on her way. She was of the poorest class, bent, lean, tattered, and her face was quite hidden behind the wings of a frowsy cap. No one seemed to observe her; only the eyes of the condemned gloated on her movements, followed them, watched her every step with an intense greed that never wavered. For she it was who stood to him, at last, for that single act of self-sacrifice with the instance of which he was to refute his slanderers and defy the grave.

It had come upon him, all at once, with the memory of that face, projected, livid and instant, from the mist of faces that had walled him in. He had recalled how, on a certain wet and dismal evening months ago, he had been crossing the Pont St. Michel on his way home after an exhausting day, when the gleam of a gold coin lying in the kennel had arrested his attention. Avaricious in the most peddling sense, he had been stooping eagerly to grasp his find, when the interposition of a second body had halted him unexpectedly on his way.

“Bon Dieu, little citizen, let the old rag-sorter be happy for once!”

He had heard the febrile plea; had checked himself and had looked. It was an old, old woman, grotesque, battered, drenched with rain. In her trembling claw, nevertheless, she had borne a shapeless green umbrella, an article sufficiently preposterous in that context of poverty and sans-culottism. No doubt the dislocation of the times accounted for her possession of it. It had burst open as she grabbed at the coin, and out had rolled a sodden red cabbage, fished from some mixen. It had borne an uncanny resemblance to a severed head, and had made him start for the moment.

“Let the old rag-sorter be happy for once.”

And, with a laugh, he had let her clutch the gold, restore the cabbage to its receptacle, and hobble off breathing benedictions on his head. God knew why he had let her--God would know. And yet God was a cipher in the scheme of things. Only, from the moment when the President had uttered those words, he had been looking--he knew it now--for the old rag-sorter to refute them. She could testify, if she would, that his life had not been entirely devoid of disinterested self-sacrifice. He had once, for another’s sake, refused a ten-franc piece.

How had she risen, and whence followed? There had been something unearthly in the apparition; there was something unearthly in his present possession by it. Yet, from the moment of his mental identification of the face, he had expected to renew the vision of it, to take it up somewhere between the prison and the scaffold, and he would have been perplexed only to find his expectation at fault. His witnesses were not wont to fail him, and this, the most personal of any, he could not afford to spare. He dwelt upon the flitting figure with a passion of interest which blinded him to the crowd, deafened him to its maledictions. Automatically he roared back blasphemy for hate; subliminally he was alone in Paris with his old rag-sorter.

He could never see her face; yet he knew it was she as surely as he knew himself. She went on and on, keeping pace with the cart, threading the throng, and always, it seemed, unobserved by it.

And then, all in a moment, the guillotine--and he was going up the steps to it!

He turned as he reached the platform. For an instant, tumult and a sense of mad disaster hemmed him in. There was a foam of upturned faces, vaster than anything he had yet realised; there was the tall, lean yoke, with its wedge of dripping steel swung up between; there was the lunette, the little window, and the corners, just visible, of the deep basket beyond into which he was to vomit his life. They were hauling away the trunk of the last victim, a ludicrous, flabby welter, into the red cart adjacent. What a way to treat a man--soulless, obscene! For one instant a deadly sickness overpowered him; he turned his head away--and saw her panting up the steps, confessed, but yet unnoticed, a jocund leer on her withered old face.

Then suddenly something happened. The thundering voice of the crowd rose to an exultant pitch; there was a crash, a numbing jerk--and he was erect again, amazed and flung at liberty.

But even in that supreme moment his vision sought out his old rag-sorter, and was for her alone. She was down on her knees, eager and mumbling, stuffing something into her green umbrella. What was it--a red cabbage--a head? He caught a glimpse of it as it went in--and it was his own head--the head of Antoine Quentin Fouquier de Tinville, ex-Public Prosecutor to the Revolutionary Tribunal.

THE QUEEN’S NURSE

Frivolous she may have been, shallow and light-hearted as a brook, but not heartless. Her nurse--she who, in modern parlance, had “taken her from the month” and had fed and bred her in the house of her father, Sir John Seymour, of Wiltshire, knight--would always defend her tooth and nail from that charge. And when at last, having followed her nursling’s dancing career through the Courts of the old gloomy Louvre and the more splendid Whitehall, she came to see her supplant in the royal caprice the unhappy Queen whose maid-of-honour she had been, she would allow in her presence no breath of detraction to slur the good fame of her darling, but would constantly aver that she had fought against the inevitable with all the desperation of which her buoyant nature was capable. Jane could never say nay to the least plausible beggar in the world, she would declare; and what was her chance when that suppliant was King Harry himself? She loved life, to be sure, the sweet butterfly--who would not with such a disposition? And when the alternative was to be broken on a wheel! How many, though deeper ones, would have chosen that in her place, she would like to know? And here was she about to justify her monarch’s choice by presenting him with a male heir--the heir for whom he had been growling and raging these twenty years past. She had no doubt it would be a male, since her bird always gave every one what he asked. And she had come to nurse her nursling through her first troublous days in this the new great palace of Hampton that the red Cardinal had built.

So she believed up to the last, and at that last the King, the least plausible beggar, sat all alone one wild October evening in the great oriel window of the great hall at the Court. It blew and rained boisterously without, and the wet, red leaves were dashed against the glass, where they ran down like gouts of blood. Their hue was reflected in the royal eyes, which stared out upon the desolate prospect between wrath and anxiety. Henry’s conscience was gnawing at his heart, in truth, and despot-like he resented the pain.

The tapers burned under that vaulted gloom like glow-worms in a dark avenue; the residue of a discarded feast lay tumbled about the tables. Apart from the golden dishes, the piles of fruit, the crusted goblets and great flagons of wine, he sat in his tremendous isolation, and fought the fight between desire and humanity. It was never, alas! but a brief struggle with him. He rose in a moment, a heavy, butcher-like figure of a man, a huge common hulk made formidable by padded doublet and “blistered” sleeves all roped and starred with gems, and, his lips puffing, the scant ginger hair bristling on his swollen neck and jowls, thundered an order into space. Instant to it an obsequious page leaped into the Presence.

“Sir Anthony Denny--summon him.”

The page vanished; the King strode up and down. At the fourth turn he paused to see a figure bow before him. This figure, for contrast, was robed all in black, with a tight coif on its head, and, hanging from its shoulders, a long, sleeveless gown edged with brown fur. It was the figure, livid and drawn-faced, of the chief barber-surgeon attending on her Majesty the Queen’s confinement.

“Sir Anthony,” said the King, “make note of our decision. Meseemeth in this realm of ours that wives be plenty, but heirs most sorely lack. Poor Jane must suffer for the succession. If one must perish----” He paused.

“It is even so, your Majesty,” murmured the physician.

The King stamped his foot, and turned away.

“I must have my heir,” he said. “God’s blood, I must and will!”

But that night, as he was crossing a corridor to his cabinet, an old woman broke upon him with tears and lamentations.

“They are killing my bird!”

“Peace, fool!” said the King, harsh and lowering. “I must have mine heir, though all birds fell dumb from this moment.”

She clung to him, but he shook her off roughly, and went on his way. She followed, importunate and beyond fear.

“Spare my nursling! She is one and only; thou canst not renew her; but many shall be her gifts of love to thee.”

He turned like a goaded bull, and the woman was dragged away.

That night the little Prince was born; and thereafter the wreck from which he had been delivered settled down, and on the twelfth day it sank into the fathomless deeps.

The King was sorry for a while; but he had his heir to reward him for the sacrifice he had made. Mary Tudor, a girl of twenty, and already as sour as crabs, was the little dead queen’s chief mourner. The trumpets brayed her obsequies, the laureate sang them in execrable verse, the baby--a pinched atom--screamed them. Only the old nurse sat dumb and dry-eyed, taking no notice of anything.

She would have nothing to do with the Prince, craved or claimed no part in his rearing. But presently she took her spinning-wheel to the little dark room by the chapel which had been allotted her; and there she would sit all day drawing flax from the distaff.

One noon, the door being open, the King in passing saw her thus occupied, and went in. She neither moved nor acknowledged his presence, but went on with her spinning. His eyes began to redden in the way all knew.

“What spinnest thou?” he demanded.

“Flax,” she answered, grim and quiet, without stopping in her work.

“For what?” he roared.

“Thy shroud,” she said, “and that of all thy house.”

Those with him thought the roof would have fallen. He raised his own blazing eyes to it, as if in momentary doubt of his omnipotence. But when he spoke at last it was noted with amazement that his words were temperate.

“That shall we see, old dotard,” he said. “Dispart her wheel and her.”

She stood up, with a smile on her thin lips, as they snatched her wheel away.

“Dispose them,” said the King, “where neither may avail the other. And, for her, take her incontinent in her sorcery, and put her where she may weave a shroud of darkness for evermore.”

He spoke, and passed out; and, as he had ordered, so was it done. The spinning-wheel was cast into a cupboard under the great staircase, and the nurse disappeared from human ken. Nothing more was heard of her for ten long years.

At the end of that time the King’s majesty lay ill. His huge bombard of a body was swollen with gout and dropsy; a mere rust of hair remained to his gross head; his hearing was capricious, and his eyes rheumy with half-blindness. He had grown slovenly in his dress; his every breath bullied the sweet air for ease and comfort; and, to cap all, his temper had grown with his deformities till hardly a man durst meet his eye.

Lying at Whitehall, he had a dream one night which troubled him. He sent for Sir Anthony Denny, always now in close attendance, and, heaving himself on his elbow, glared at the physician through a mist of anguish.

“Give me,” he said, “to mend this whirring in my brain.”

Sir Anthony, quaking in his list slippers, prescribed and administered a febrifuge. It availed little. Day and night the buzzing noise went on until it grew to madness. One morning the King groaned in torture: “It droneth, droneth for ever like a wheel!” and of a sudden sat up as if stricken.

“The old beldame’s!” he whispered. “What of it?”

It was some time before the alarmed leech could gather the import of his question, and then he hurried to have inquiries made. A special courier was despatched boot and spur to Hampton Court. But in these full years the very memory of the incident had vanished, and none knew where the wheel had been deposited. Only it seemed that others there had been haunted of late by a mysterious sound, so that none dared venture by the great staircase whence it appeared to proceed. And that was the message returned, in fear and trembling, to the tyrant.

He raged: “I will have no mysteries in my house. Pluck the stairway down.”

A despot’s will is law. In preparing to obey it the masons came upon the wheel. The King, being informed of the discovery, roared like a wounded tiger.

“Burn the thing to ashes!” he thundered, and, on the very word, turned white and mumbled. “Nay,” he said, in a fallen voice, “put it where the arts of Satan may not prevail with it; hide it away in my royal chapel, and the fiend shall be baffled. And look you that none comes near me in the night again to choke me in my shroud.”

His mind was impaired; it was evident that he was approaching his end; yet through all his desperation and mental anguish the inflexible will, which had surmounted all other wills of half the world, remained true, as history knows, to its dogged traditions. Almost his last breath was given to confirm the death sentence passed on a great subject. If one bitterer pang than another rent his released spirit, it must have been that which showed him his final vengeance unaccomplished.

And, in the meanwhile, none dared approach him with the truth of his nearing dissolution. He had killed men in the past for prophesying his mortality. He had held death so cheaply, had carried it so lightly in the hollow of his hand, that he could not believe it capable of striking at his omnipotence.

But there came a time when the truth could be no longer withheld from him, and Sir Anthony Denny was the one deputed to break it. He approached his task with a very natural apprehension, the more so as his Majesty had that morning shown some increased signs of confidence in his own recovery. He greeted the physician’s return with a distorted smile.

“I shall live to plague mine enemies yet,” he said, “so I can pluck this cursed hornet from my brain. Look you, man, I see a cause. It is my mind accusing me of an over-harshness in the past. Poor Jane her nurse, that old demented fool! Well, she loved her; the debt is paid; let her go free, I say.”

The physician stood aghast. He had been half expecting this thunderbolt ever since the King’s sick fancy had raised the dust of a long-forgotten sentence.

“Your Majesty,” he whispered, “your Majesty! The beldame died in prison this very day se’nnight.”

“This day!” The King struggled into a sitting posture. His face was like nothing human. “This day se’nnight!” He battled for breath. “It was when the sound began. God’s mercy! the wheel!”

“Alas, your Majesty!” half whimpered the leech; “there be those who say they cannot hear themselves pray for its whirring. The chapel is deserted.”

The King fell back, and raised his hands feebly, as if drawing something over his face. For an instant it appeared to the agitated physician as if a shroud of white had actually hidden it; but, on nearer approach, he saw that it was the frost of death that had fallen.

Long years after, a tradition which had for ages associated a muffled, incomprehensible droning with the occurrence of any death in the palace received, “in the white winter of its age,” a curious justification. Some workmen, in breaking through a wall of the old chapel, came upon an ancient spinning-wheel hidden away behind the panelling.

LOUIS XIV

Looking over the inner Cour de Marbre at Versailles Palace were two little rooms, in the main pile of the building, which constituted the very core of privacy in the Petits Appartements du Roi. One was his Majesty’s “den,” the other his wig-room, and both were elegantly simple, almost severe, in their appointments. In the Galerie des Glaces adjoining, marble, paint, crystal, and silver, in lavish profusion, represented to the public eye the habitual equipage of a Grand Monarch; these more restful surroundings represented to the monarch himself his secret possession of some emotions felt in common with the vulgar herd, to wit, the joys of a retreat where he could do just as he liked, without the necessity of posing to himself or others. A few chairs, a table, a secrétaire--all profusely painted and be-ormolued, it was true, but for the simple reason that beauty unadorned was unprocurable in the Paris of the period--sober hangings, a quiet picture or so--such was the furniture of the little apartment appropriated by Louis XIV. to his inmost meditations.

We find him in this distinguished snuggery on a certain afternoon of the year 1704--the twenty-first of August, to be exact. It is within three days of St. Bartholomew, a feast which his Most Catholic Majesty makes a particular point of solemnising. He is, in fact, pondering a minor detail of its observances at this very moment.

As he sits, his eyes fixed on nothingness in crinkled abstraction, we will seize the fearful opportunity to scrutinise him. He is sixty-six years of age, and in suggestion, we think, more like a queen-dowager than a monarch. His minute stature, his old-matronly face, worldly, shrewd, not unkindly; his immense falling wig, resembling a cap with hanging wattles; his feminine particularities and prejudices, all combine to convey that false impression of his sex. He has a woman’s tastes for dainty clothes and china and gossip; I am convinced that, were it possible to conceive him stooping to the condescension, he would play the part of Madame more realistically than the Chevalier d’Eon himself came to play it.

He is attired (for monarchs do not dress) in a full-skirted coat of apricot velvet, with silver frogs. The coat is left unbuttoned from neck to waist, revealing an ample breast of cambric and a rich lace cravat. His white silk stockings are rolled back over their garters, which are fastened above the knee, and embrace breeches of the same velvet material; and stiff diamond-buckled shoes, with square toes, long tongues, and very high silver heels, complete the exquisite picture.

So he poses, and posed, as punctilious in his homage to himself as any courtier. If he did not appear, in bulk, a star of the first magnitude, he was as brilliant a centre as his own dazzled system need desire.

An odd train of thought was in Louis’s mind as he sat thus gazing into vacancy. The nearness of the Feast of St. Bartholomew was its central subject, since it entailed the repetition of a custom long practised by him to significant effect. Or had there been any connection between the custom and the effect? That was just the question in his mind. He was inclining, for some extraordinary reason, to doubt for the first time their relationship. It had come upon him all in an instant at what, adopting the fashion, we must call a psychologic moment in his career.

He was not, according to some people, a really wise man; but there was no denying that he was a supremely self-sufficient. It had never occurred to him, in all his life, that his judgment could possibly be surpassed by another. That was the queer thing. He had tacitly, almost unconsciously, it seemed, permitted, in one curious instance, his mental supremacy to subordinate itself to a superstition. He appeared to recognise the fact all at once, and with an amazement that was like one of those sudden developments of reason which a child will exhibit between a single night’s sleeping and waking. Something had happened to him, and he saw himself in a moment--not a fool; that were impossible--but, in a certain solitary direction, a dupe to his own modesty. Quality, kingship, all his greatness as it stood, he had let be accounted, by default, less to the essence of divinity in himself than to a paltry charm, in the accidental possession of which any quacksalver might boast himself omniscient. He felt strangely small all of a sudden.

Presently he stirred, and threw out his chest. Small! He, Louis? Had he not made France what she was? Had he not in the blood of two great wars, prolonged, triumphant, deadly, cemented the fabric of state of which he stood, golden, sacrosanct, the supreme expression? Was he not at this date the most powerful monarch, the most glorious, the most dreaded that a dazzled world had ever worshipped? And since some there remained who questioned his preeminence, were not his armies at this moment opening a third victorious campaign in order to re-convince the recalcitrants? And to what was all this success to be attributed--to his own mastering genius, inspired, stupendous, or to his possession of a trumpery talisman, whose favour, even, was conditional?

He drew in his breath, with a slight hissing sound, as if he had been stung. Superstition? an aberration, to which the mightiest were subject. He thanked his majestic stars only that the knowledge of it was private to himself.

He half rose, and sank into his chair again, with a frown. It was his custom, he told himself haughtily, to command Destiny, not truckle to it. How had he come to concede even this single exception to his custom? There was a blind spot, it was said, in every eye; perhaps there was some like defect in every kingly constitution. The heel of Achilles! Or, maybe--what else?

Age!

The word seemed to smite him out of the depths. He almost jumped where he sat. This business, so childish in its credulity! Merciful Heaven! was it possible he could be verging on his _second_ childhood--he, Louis, who had almost come to convince himself that he was destined to the fiery chariot? Of late the sun discs, the emblems of the _Roi soleil_, had increased in number on his walls and ceilings. Perhaps they, too, were a sign of his dotage.

He hesitated no longer, but, rising hastily, sought the secrétaire against the wall, and, feeling in a very remote and secret little recess of it, brought out a tiny packet, somewhat like a Hebrew phylactery in suggestion. It was no more than a couple of inches or so square, of vellum, flattish in form, and closely sealed with an odd, incomprehensible device. A number of pin-pricks perforated it.