CHAPTER XIII.

THE HONEYMOON TRIP.

It is a mistake to begin married life by gormandizing, by an outlay which one cannot afford, by affectation of a social position to which luxuries are common, or by servility to the despotism of fashion. Our friends in the Rue la de Vieille Estrapade knew and dreaded all this. They owned that the ostentatious enjoyment which brings remorse at its heels is not worth the cost. Therefore, though they 'did the thing,' as the bridegroom put it, properly--that is, not shabbily--they did not put on airs and ape the grand. They did not gormandize, for gluttony leads to a fit of indigestion, and that leads to bad temper. They did not waste economies that might be needed after; but they had a jovial party conducted on the principles of prescient generosity. To be paradoxical, the wedding-breakfast and surroundings were a sample of thrifty extravagance. No more was spent on dresses and favours, bouquets and gloves, than could well be avoided without the semblance of meanness. No big man of the quarter was invited to the feast simply because he was a big man--wore massive gold trinkets, had a balance at his banker's, a prominent pew in church, a seat at the council of Paris magnates, or a villa in the suburbs with a large garden. These people condescend; curse people who condescend, but compassionate not the people who stand condescension! They are treated as they deserve.

The custom in Paris is that those who cannot go for the honeymoon to Baden, or to a friend's country-house, pass it apart in some secluded suburb. O'H. and Madame O'H. were not such fools; they resolved to pass it under the captain's roof--their future home; they had no particular wish or necessity to confine themselves to each other's society till they lost novelty and palled on each other, seeing that they were linked while they breathed, and would have ample leisure to improve acquaintance, and spy out small imperfections. For, look you, this is no romance; our heroes and heroines are real, which is saying they are human and weak. The way to celebrate the marriage-day is just as one celebrates any ordinary holiday; the way to enjoy the honeymoon is in activity in the midst of bustling life, not in mooning indolence. The place for both is at home, amongst those whom we know and who are attached to us.

This is what our friends did. They drove to the Mairie and the church as we have described; they had a hearty breakfast, at which none were present but the five of the wedding party. Caroline did not fling a shower of rice at the retreating figure of the O'Hoolohan as he left for his château in Spain, but sensibly put the rice in a pot to boil for a supper pudding. Nor did the captain throw an old slipper at the poll of his departing Berthe, for old slippers are useful when one is gouty, and, besides, they sometimes disarrange a head-dress and hurt a little head.

Rice and old slippers! What superstitious folly! And yet some very eminent men, wise and no way credulous, have been burdened with the log of superstition. Tyco Brahé was afraid to lay the first stone of his observatory till the stars were in a 'happy conjunction.' The astronomer who discovered the spots on the sun wiped his spectrum fifty times before he could persuade himself to believe his own sight. Sainte-Beuve, sceptic though he was, grew pale if the salt were spilt.

O'Hoolohan and O'Hara were not superstitious. They were of the school which believes that it is unlucky to walk under a ladder--only when an awkward workman is handling bricks overhead; unlucky to sit down thirteen at table--only when there is not food enough for more than twelve.

But Captain Chauvin was superstitious, after a kind. Like his idol, he held by destiny, and had faith in his planet. On all high days and holy days it was his wont to make pilgrimage to the shrine of his patron saint. Call this whim if you like, superstition if you will. On this happy day his secretly-cherished idea was to carry out his habit, and the moment he spoke of it his friends agreed to humour him. And in this wise it came to pass that there was a honeymoon trip, but a brief one in limit of time and travelling.

Now, where should the honeymoon trip be taken? In London, that is a question easier to answer than in Paris.

'Anywhere, anywhere _out_ of London,' would be the answer.

But in Paris the air you breathe is pure and brisk; the flowers in the city grass-plots are fresh and fragrant; the waters of the Seine course swiftly on with sparkling movement; the tall trees on the boulevards make friendly rustle; there are wide shady shrubs, clad in thick mantle of emerald, varied with citron and flecked with brown, in the public gardens; silvery fountains seem to dance to inaudible music; the shafts of sunshine play through clustering branches in the Elysian Fields and the Luxembourg, and make fretwork of black and gold on the smooth sward. This happens when Nature is in gracious mood and scatters broadcast her charms from her bounteous lap. In Paris her mood is usually gracious, for Paris is the favoured city, the queen-city, the one haunt of the multitude where you can meet the Rus in Urbe, where you can salute the pets of art in the bosom of the Benign Mother.

In two open victorias the party started on the trip. Captain Chauvin and Caroline were on the seat of the first, and O'Hara on the strapontin in front of them, dangerously near to the tempting hands of the tall girl and in full range of her witching eyes. The bridegroom and bride were in the second victoria. The captain went foremost, for he was _cicerone_. To the Champ de Mars they drove first and entered the Military School, the Chelsea Hospital of France.

'Go up, my children,' said Captain Chauvin; 'I am too feeble to accompany you. Mount one hundred and seventy-three steps and you will find the cell my saint occupied when he was a boy. There he lay in his camp-bed; there he dreamed dreams, and there he made his first sketch. Till your return, I shall fight an old fight with--a comrade.'

When they descended, the captain escorted them to the adjoining church.

'Here,' he said, 'he rests, the mortal part of him; here he was carried to his tomb by the heirs of the dynasty he helped to overthrow. You see, my children, he sleeps in the midst of the ancient braves at whose head he once marched to victory; there, on the bronze tripod, is the sword he wore at Austerlitz; look above, where those dusty trophies droop, ah! sixty of them--this poor arm helped to win some few--they are flags taken from the enemy in fair fight. They are--torn, bullet-pierced, and time-mouldered as they are--the emblems of a glory that will live while lives the world!'

The O'Hoolohan was getting excited. His brow flushed and his eyes flashed. He tapped one foot on the marble floor like a restive charger awaiting the trumpet-call to advance. He scanned the aisles and niches of the sacred building as if he were searching for some lurking foe; he clenched his right hand on an imaginary sword-hilt as if on the point of rushing into some shock of battle. With all his calmness in actual combat, such as we saw him at Clamart, this man was capable of being roused to a flood-tide of passion, when his heart and imagination were touched.

'Glory, grandfather,' urged Berthe; 'is it not very dearly bought, sometimes? Suppose we kneel and pray that France may have a crop of glory that is not so dreadful in the offering or so sad in the fruit for the future.'

'You are right, my child,' acceded the captain, for this time it was not the old soldier, but the old man who spoke, and they all knelt and prayed, though it would be unsafe to pretend that they prayed with equal fervour, or that the object of their petitions was the same.

The next stage in the pilgrimage was the Quai Conti, opposite the statue of Henry IV., on the Pont Neuf. Here, on the fifth story of the house, No. 5, a young officer of artillery, lately commissioned from the school of Brienne, lived in 1785. A struggling painter poked the fire in the garret, haunted by the shadow of the ambitious Bonaparte, the awkwardly built, dwarfish stripling, with high cheek-bones, sallow complexion and deep-sunken orbs, who came to the window at nights and gazed palace-wards and sky-wards so long and earnestly, his hands clasped behind his back, and then broke into a hurried, jerking, sentry-walk to and fro in his circumscribed chamber.

To the Hôtel de Metz in the Rue du Mail next, where Bonaparte lodged, at No. 14 on the third story, in 1792. At that period he dined at a restaurant in the Rue des Petits-Pères. The dishes there were cheap. They cost but six sous each. Cheap as they were, he had once to make a forced march with his watch upon the nearest pawn-office before he could raise means to stay the calls of appetite.

At the corner of the Rue du Mail and the Rue Montmartre is, or was, the Hotel of the Rights of Man. By the time Bonaparte had got thus far, he had made comparatively good progress on the ladder of fortune. He had four windows in a row now in his apartment, and three chambers, two of which were shared with his brothers Louis and Junot.

Three years later, Bonaparte, now a general of artillery, resided in No. 19, Rue de la Michodière, in a small furnished room. He was going up, but he was no wastrel. Not till later on did he choose to change his dwelling to the Hôtel Mirabeau, in the Alley of the Dauphin, near the Tuileries. An episode of his career is laid in this hotel, which the dramatists should seize and turn to their purposes. It might have influenced the fate of nations. Had it come to its natural issue, the maps might be drawn otherwise to-day. Fanchette, the daughter of Père Thouset, the landlord, took a liking to the young general of the Republic. She was not ill-favoured; and he might make a steady husband. The general tried his arms in a field other than his, and, with his usual luck, he made a conquest. Father-in-law, who was rich, consented to a marriage, on two conditions: the first, that Bonaparte should quit the army; the second, that he should become an hotel-keeper! But an accident befell Fanchette which put Cupid's nose out of joint, much to the benefit of his brother Mars.

The time came when Napoleon mounted to the topmost rung, lived in castles and palaces, was guest and host of kings; but our friends were satisfied--indeed, were more pleased with visiting his humble habitations--the cell of the student, the airy garrets of the adventurous soldier. The struggles of greatness to the light awaken emotions more touching than all the magnificence of assured success.

They trended by the Rue St. Honoré to the church of St. Roch. There it was the tide turned--there the hero had his first chance. It was the twelfth Vendémiaire of the year IV., that is to say, the 22nd October, 1795. Thirty-three sections of the population rose in discontent at a decree reserving to the Convention two-thirds of the places in the Council of the Five Hundred. They were thirty thousand strong, and marched on the Tuileries. The Convention had but twelve thousand men to oppose them, and gave the command to Barras, who called in Bonaparte. The captain, obscure till then, notwithstanding his services at Toulon, put forty-two pieces of cannon round the palace, and mowed down the insurgents. Their headquarters was the church of St. Roch. Bonaparte, with correct, remorseless aim, pointed two guns with his own hand on the crowd collected on the steps of the edifice and fired. The sections were defeated; the corner-stone was laid of the reputation that was to mount so high.

'I vote we wind up by paying a visit to the column in the Place Vendôme,' said the O'Hoolohan, who was an admirer of Napoleon, but who was getting hungry and who began to think he had enough of hero-worship for his marriage-day.

'No, my son,' said Captain Chauvin, 'I always make it a point of hanging a wreath of immortelles on the rails at the base of the column on the 5th of May, the anniversary of his death; but I never like to go there but that one day of the twelve months. No, we shall first try a visit to the Louvre--it is not yet closed--and I love to show, to those who can value relics of the kind, the statue of the one man I reverenced, when he was in the beauty of his manhood.'

They went and saw the statue. It represents Napoleon as he might have been at the epoch of Lodi, before he had trained his features to the impassiveness of stone, before he had waxed dumpish, and wore a stiff curl on his broad, bald forehead. An idealized Napoleon this, impetuous energy in his gaze, expression, attitude; mastery in the eagle eyes; vigour in the gaunt limbs; resolution in the big lean jaws; dogged obstinacy in the close-shut lips and close-cut chin. What an irresistible forcefulness in the balance of the eager pose! what a cloudy-and-lightning poetry in the long wild hair sweeping like a mane over his shoulders!

Thus should heroes be eternized in brass, or granite, or marble, while they are instinct with the glory of action, not when they are aged and fatten and grow bilious and use ear-trumpets. They should be given to posterity in their prime, when they did the great things for which posterity will remember them. Great is the anointed of Notre Dame; but greater is the victor of Lodi!

This O'Hara said, first warming with the associations of the Napoleon room of the Louvre, and then kindled into enthusiasm by the applause of Captain Chauvin, whose heart was so young for all his white beard and deep wrinkles; and Caroline looked at the speaker approvingly, and he looked back, and suddenly it was revealed to him that she was strikingly handsome.

That night when he retired to rest in his hotel in the Latin Quarter, the tress of hair he had long kept warm at his breast was missing.

Was this an omen?