Part 14

One may be very sure that long ere another seven years had browned the fair hair, he was familiar with the fact that the guardian angels of M. Hyrvoix and M. Legrange kept unsleeping watch over the personal safety of his father, his mother, and himself. That officials, functionaries, ladies of the Court, and lackeys, male and female, were maintained under constant and vigilant surveillance. That there were even Police to watch the Police who kept the Police under observation. That precautions of a peculiarly special and delicate nature were observed with regard to the food prepared in the Imperial Kitchens and the wine that came from the Imperial Cellars, lest deadly poison should be mingled therein by those who did not love the name of Bonaparte.

He learned, next,--perhaps the knowledge floated in the air he breathed like some strange pollen, or was realized from certain experiences garnered during Imperial Progresses, Distributions of Awards, Opening Ceremonies, and other public Functions,--that there were many of these naughty people, who, while the soldiers and certain of the townsfolk in the streets cried "_Vive l'Empereur!_" "_Vive l'Impératrice!_" and "_Vive le Prince Impérial!_" remained silent even though they uncovered, and a vast number who not only did not cheer, but kept their hats on, and sometimes hissed. Following, came the shocking discovery that there existed a party of extremists who were not content with being rude and making ugly noises, but had even tried--and tried more than once--to kill the Emperor....

"_To kill papa, who is so good to me! ..._"

In a glass case in the Empress's cabinet were preserved the crush-hat and the cloak worn by the Emperor on the night of Orsini's attempt outside the Opera, and damaged by a splinter from one of the exploding bombs. Perhaps that glass case now yielded up its sinister secret to the curious questionings of a child.

The discovery that this father, so indulgent, so tender, and so much beloved, should be the object of such destroying hate as was cherished by these nameless men was terrible. You may go farther into the thing, and suppose its breaking in upon him presently that many thousands of his father's subjects, not criminals or murderers, but rather estimable persons than otherwise, thrilled with something else than tenderness at the mention of the paternal name, and that the Empire, which had hitherto signified for him the adamantine hub on which rests the pivot of this spinning world of ours--was not as solidly founded as his pedagogues had taught him. That the Army, the Peasantry, certain of the Nobility--not of the Ancient Régime--and a section of the Bourgeoisie supported it; but that by the educated middle-class, and by the intellectual, professional and working-classes it was held in abomination--execrated and detested; hated with a bitterness that intensified from day to day.

The cat came out of the bag a full-grown tiger. Revelations, discoveries, succeeded one another. Disillusions came crowding thick and fast. When it was discovered that he was backward for his age, and the question of a new private tutor was being discussed, he had asked his Governor:

"Could I not go to a day-school like Corvisart and Fleury and the Labédoyère boys?"

"Impossible, Monseigneur!" was the answer.

He urged:

"But, _mon cher Général_, you answer that to so many questions. Pray, this time explain why?"

Horribly nonplussed, the military governor stammered:

"The heir to an Imperial Throne could not be sent twice daily to a day-school. Not to be dreamed of! Such an innovation would be the signal for fresh insults, provocation of new perils.... Never could it be allowed!"

The boy's were rather dreamy eyes, under the silken plume of hair, chestnut-brown like his beautiful mother's. They were proud eyes, too, when they had flashed at the word "insult." And brave, for mention of "perils" only made them smile. He said thoughtfully that morning, leaning his elbow on an unfinished Latin exercise that lay on the table in the window of his study at the Château of St. Cloud:

"An 'innovation' means something that is new. But Primoli and Joachim Murat are being educated at a French College, and did not the late King send his sons to be boarders at the Lycée Henri IV.? Could not I be a boarder at the Lycée Napoléon, or the Lycée Bonaparte, M. le Général?"

With labored clearness and a great deal of circumlocution, M. le Général explained:

"The heir of a Democratic Empire, Monseigneur, and the sons of a bourgeois Royalty cannot be regarded upon the same level, or educated upon identical principles. But a plan has been devised for bringing your Imperial Highness into actual touch with the life of a public school...."

"How? Tell me quickly, M. le Général!"

The child's delicate face flushed bright red. His eyes shone. He sat upright in his chair as though a vivifying breath had passed through him, waiting the reply. It came....

"One of the Professors of the Elementary Class has been engaged to take your Imperial Highness through the course prescribed for the other pupils. He will attend daily here, or at the Tuileries."

The child said, with a catching of the breath that was almost a sob, and a look of bitter disappointment:

"The boys.... Then I shall not know the boys?"

"No, Monseigneur, except by hearsay. The Professor will tell you their names, ages, and--ah!--leading characteristics.... You will learn with them, and every week you will write a composition with them, recapitulating what you have learned. And that they will hear of you goes without saying. Frequently, Monseigneur, but frequently!"

His pupil interrupted:

"They will hear of me, but what is that? They will never see me--I shall never see them! Never join in their games--never be just another boy with them! Never be friends or foes with them--never beat them or be---- No! I should not like to be beaten at all!"

M. le Général rejoined solemnly:

"That degrading possibility, and graver dangers still, will be averted by the fact that their Imperial schoolfellow will not be--ah!--bodily present in their midst, my Prince. Perhaps your Imperial Highness would like to see the Professor now?"

And so the Professor came, and from him the boy eagerly gleaned information about his little schoolfellows of the Seventh Form. He had friends of his own who came to him after High Mass on Sundays and on all holidays. But except Espinasse, they had been chosen for him. The joy of selection and choice he was not to know.

Thus, many men of mark from different Lycées succeeded one another in the work-room at the Château and successively occupied the arm-chair at the end of the leather-covered table in one of the three windows of his corner study on the third story of the Pavilion de Flore at the Tuileries--and when he had been attentive and pleased his Professor,--his reward would be to hear about the boys.... Some were noble, splendid fellows, full of cleverness, energy and spirits; others were funny by reason of sheer stupidity, or some quaint characteristic or absurd failing which had gained them nicknames among the rest. A few were spoken of almost with reverence, as being dowered with the magical gift of genius: poets, dramatists, novelists, scientists in embryo, budding naval or military commanders, explorers who were to plant the Flag of France in virgin corners of the earth and proudly add them to the Empire that would one day be his own....

He met his longed-for boys at last. One likes to picture him--having once taken a First Place in the Arithmetic Class--as being permitted to join in the St. Charlemagne fête of the Lycée Bonaparte. He sat in the center of one of the long tables, with long vistas of boys, boys, boys opening out before him whichever way he turned his head. And he was happy, but for this thing; that though most of the boys in whom he had been particularly interested were presented to him, he did not find--as secretly he hoped to find--the friend of whom he dreamed....

He tried to be _bon camarade_; to combine--and he had a special gift in this--easy good-fellowship with graciousness. But the boys did not respond as he would have liked. They stood to attention, and looked him in the face, and answered, "Yes, Monseigneur! No, Monseigneur!" boldly, or they shuffled and blinked, and answered, "No, Monseigneur! Yes, Monseigneur!" mumblingly, and that was all.

He wished, secretly yet ardently, for brave, proud eyes to meet his own, and strike out the sacred spark of chaste and mutual fire that kindles the pure, undying flame of Friendship's altar. He longed for a grave, melodious voice to match the noble, youthful face and the fine form of his chosen friend. He sought a nature to lean upon, which should be stronger, greater, than his own.... Superior talents, greater capacities, ambitions to share, successes to emulate. And he found none. Not a boy here was a patch upon the shoe of gay, gallant, lovable, merry Espinasse, who had never come up to his Prince's notion of a bosom-friend. Could it be that the other self did not exist anywhere? We turned from that thought, we who were lonely when we were young. It made the world feel so big and cold.

The Fête of St. Charlemagne having passed off without any untoward incident or disagreeable demonstration, an unhappy inspiration on the part of M. Victor Duruy prompted the suggestion that the Emperor's heir should preside at the distribution of prizes for the Concours Général, and thus be for the second time brought into sympathetic touch with the intellectual youth of France.

You are to imagine the picture of the stately entry into the great Hall upon the first-floor of the Sorbonne upon an evening in mid-August; the reception by the Minister of Public Instruction, gowned and capped and hooded, and the Representatives of the Faculties; the ominously restricted and frigid applause of professors and students, greeting references made in the Rector's Latin speech to the presence of an Imperial Prince in the classic groves of Akademos.

Hostility, hidden behind a mask of frigid indifference, was to dash down the brittle sham, and show the fierce eyes of scorn and the livid hue of hatred, and the writhed lips dumb with reproaches unutterable. Contempt and mockery were to be conveyed in the small sibilant _s'ss_! that rippled from parterre to gallery, and by the intolerable jeering titter that replied.

Yet all might have passed off tolerably but for the beldam Fate, who had arranged that the second prize for Greek translation, a trio of calf-bound, gilt-backed volumes containing the Works of Thucydides, had--together with a laurel crown--fallen to Louis-Eugène Cavaignac.

The young voice had not faltered in reading the name upon the illuminated scroll. What did its owner know of the Revolutionary soldier, the dauntless foe of Abd-el-Kader? The Governor-General of Algeria who had been recalled to Paris to assume the functions of Minister at War to the Republican Government of 1848. The man who had upheld the office of Dictator during the period of terror that had followed the fatal days of June! The candidate for the Presidency of the Republic who had scorned to bribe; who had calmly accepted his defeat, and taken his place in the National Assembly, when Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the good citizen, was elected to the arm-chair upon the tribune, and took the oath of fidelity to the Republic of France. Who had been imprisoned in the Fortress of Ham, with other Representatives of the Left,--his gaoler a commandant named Baudot, whom he himself had appointed in '48,--his guards the 40th Regiment of the Line, which had been subject to his orders so short a time before.

Of his seven fellow-captives between those grim and oozing walls, one was paralyzed upon release, others were victims to chronic rheumatism. Cavaignac had lived in retirement until the elections of June, 1857, when he was chosen as one of the Deputies for the Seine, in opposition to an Imperialist candidate. A few weeks later he had died suddenly, leaving a wife and a son three years old.

This son, who had half-risen from his place upon the bench at the sound of the voice that called upon him in the name that had been his father's, had all these memories in his flaming eyes. He did not seem to hear the applause that greeted his triumph; he gazed steadily into the face of the young Bonaparte, and then looked toward his mother. And Madame Cavaignac, seated, beautiful and stern as a matron of old Rome, relentless as Fate, in the front of the gallery opposite, signed to him with an imperious gesture to sit down. He obeyed her. And then round upon round of deafening plaudits made the walls and rafters of the ancient building shake; and brought the gray dust of six centuries drifting down upon the black or brown or golden locks of the hopeful youth of France.

After that episode the heir of the Imperial dignities was not again brought in contact with the students of the lyceums. He made no reference to the prize-winner who had refused the prize tendered by the son of his dead father's relentless enemy. But the insult had gone to the quick. Recalling it, he would clench his hands until the nails dug deep into the delicate flesh, crying inwardly:

"Oh! to be a man full-grown, and avenge that day with blood!"

At other times he would weep passionately in secret over the memory of the outrage; for, being of a sensitive, affectionate and generous nature, it sorely hurt to find himself the object of such hatred from one in whom,--it seemed to him, and perhaps indeed it was so!--he might have found the bosom-friend and _alter ego_, so keenly longed for and so eagerly sought.

The bright dark eyes and clear-cut features, the well-set head and athletic form, the dignified, yet modest bearing of this boy, so superior to himself in everything but wealth and station, fitted the niche previously prepared. And when he fell to dreaming, young Cavaignac's resolute face and calm, contemptuous bearing were invariably opposed to his own unslumbering resentment, and finally-conquering generosity. For, varied as the plot might be, the _dénouement_ of each little drama would always be the same.

They would meet, in manhood, upon some field of bloody battle, during the great war beginning with the French invasion of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, ending with the conquest of Germany and the annexation of the left bank of the Rhine. A youth upon the verge of manhood, the dreamer would have performed such prodigies of valor in command of his regiment as to justify his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Army of Invasion. He had not decided what would happen. There would be a great charge of cavalry led against overwhelming odds, under a deadly fire of infantry and artillery, by himself. He would cut down or shoot a gigantic Prussian trooper, who had wounded a French officer. He would lightly leap from his own charger--the Arab "_Selim_" given him by Sultan Abdul Aziz--and aid the prostrate man to rise and mount. Their looks would meet, the blue-gray and the fiery black eyes would strike out a spark of mutual recognition. Oh! the joy of heaping coals of fire upon that beautiful, rebellious head!

Or Cavaignac would not then recognize his saviour, but long afterward, the Prince having become Emperor, would head a conspiracy to dethrone him. Moving, as would be the wont of the Fourth Napoleon, in disguise through the public places of his capital, mingling with every rank and class, a mystery to men, an enigma to women, worshiped by all, known by none; he would have discovered the plot and laid a counter-plot, which, of course, would be successful. The mine would explode harmlessly--the conspirators would be seized. Their leader,--lying under sentence of death in a military fortress--probably Mont Valérien--bedded upon damp straw, loaded with massive fetters, would be visited by a young officer. He would recall the features of his deliverer of long ago, and fall upon his neck, crying: "Alas! my noble friend, long sought, unfound till now, thou comest late, but in time, for I am to die to-morrow!" "Die! Is it possible! Of what art thou guilty, then?" Cavaignac would answer coldly: "Of having conspired to dethrone the young Emperor!" "Dost thou indeed hate him so?" "Ay! we have been enemies since boyhood's days." Choking with emotion, dissembled under a pale and resolute exterior, the visitor would return: "And he hates thee not! Were he here he would say as much to thee!" "Can it be possible? How, then----?" "I swear it upon the soul of my father! Thy Emperor is thy truest friend! Here is my sword. Behold this undefended breast, cage of a heart that has ever loved thee! Thrust, I command thee, if thou hast the power!" "Sire, I am conquered; I have lived for a Republic--I die the Emperor's most loyal subject!" "To my arms, then, Cavaignac! Embrace me--thou art forgiven!"

Impossible, beautiful dreams, grandiose and absurd, ridiculous and touching....

He was mentally carrying on one of these endless duologues as he rode through the wintry avenues of the Bois, and dismounted at my Lord Hertford's exquisite villa of Bagatelle, set in beautiful, secluded grounds adjoining the park.

Born of a whim of the Comte d'Artois, gay Monsieur, brother of the Sixteenth Louis, built in fifty-four days by the architect Bellanger, at a cost of six hundred thousand livres, Bagatelle had always served as a shelter for gallant adventures, not all of them set in what Republicans scornfully termed "the night of monarchy."

Mademoiselle de Charolais, beautiful and haughty; Mademoiselle de Beauharnais, handsome, sensual, and unscrupulous; Madame Tallien, constant, noble, and courageous; the Duchesse de Berri, and how many other women, famous or infamous, had trodden its velvet lawns and swept over its floors of rare marquetry or its pavements of mosaic? The blood of the Beauharnais mingled in this boy's own veins, with the Corsican and Spanish tides and the dash of canny Scots derived from distant Kirkpatricks. That Celtic strain was responsible, it may be, for his dreaminess and love of solitude.

He was dreaming as he rode through the forest; the spell of his dream was still upon him as he turned his Arab in at the gilded gates of Bagatelle, and dismounted before its portico, in the shadow of the Gothic tower.

From childhood many of the happiest hours of this son of the Empire had been spent at Bagatelle. In its labyrinths of myrtle and oleander, laurel and syringa, he had hidden, bursting with childish laughter, when his playmates were seeking him; he had galloped his Shetland pony and raced with his dogs over its green lawns. Upon its broad sheets of crystal water he had sailed his miniature yacht-squadrons. At his entreaty, the Emperor, always an indulgent father, had endeavored to buy the place from its English owner. In vain! my lord of Hertford was not to be tempted by gold, possessing so much of the stuff, or allured by rank, who was a premier English Marquess, Knight of the Garter, and so forth. Yet he was a generous nobleman, and made the Imperial urchin free of his coveted fairyland whenever he, the owner of the place, should be from home.

To-day's dream, for a wonder, was not the usual duologue between the friend and the unfriend. Albeit innocently, it was tinged by sex, it assumed the shape of the triangle; and worked out, though, to the satisfaction of the dreamer, the eternal Rule of Three. Louis and his dear enemy, men grown, madly loved one woman; a bewitching creature, with a sparkling rose-flushed face, eyes like blue jewels under a pile of black hair, crowned with a little cap of velvet and gray fur, with a blue wing set at the side. She adored the Prince who had won her love in the disguise of a simple officer. Fortified by this passion, she could hear Cavaignac plead unmoved. He, driven to frenzy by jealousy, would conceal himself here, for the Imperial lover would have settled Bagatelle with all its treasures upon his lady-love!--and at midnight when a step echoed in the gallery of arms, and the fair one, reclining upon this very fauteuil in the window commanding the grass-plot centered by the Cellini fountain,--sprang up with a cry of joy to welcome her lover,--the rejected aspirant would leap from behind yonder trophy of sixteenth-century pageant-shields, topped with the magnificent embossed and damascened one bearing the monogram and insignia of Diane de Poitiers; and, seizing yonder rapier from its stand, would challenge his successful rival there and then, to a duel _à outrance_.

Need it be said that the Prince's well-known mastery of the sword would enable him,--by a lightning _coup_, following a feint--to disarm his antagonist; upon whom he would finally bestow not only the lady, but the villa, with its treasures of paintings by ancient and modern masters, its marvelous miniatures and enamels, its rooms of porcelain, cabinets of priceless coins and gems, galleries of antique sculpture, its costly furniture, its matchless grounds and gardens, ending a great many nobly turned sentences with the dignified peroration:

"Take her, Cavaignac, with all these riches! I ask nothing in return, but your esteem!"

XX

Could Juliette have known how she had been disposed of in a boy's imagination, perhaps the Spanish Infanta would have replaced the rosy nymph. But while her Prince dreamed, her jingling vehicle had crossed the Port de St. Cloud, and so by Ville d'Avray up the long avenue between the breasting woods, stately and glorious still, though stripped by the blasts of January, to the clean white town that had sprung up, nearly three hundred years before (upon the site of a little village patronized by wagoners), where an ancient feudal castle stood on a plateau surrounded by lake, forest, and marsh.

A touch of a King's scepter changed this ancient castle to a Royal Hunting-Lodge, a whim of his successor transformed the humbler dwelling to a Palace. Courtiers, officials, functionaries, guards, valets, lackeys, pimps, cooks, barbers and innumerable hangers-on are necessary to the upkeep of State; and these must be housed in stately fashion. Behold whole streets of buildings, with noble avenues, radiating like the sticks of a fan from the sunlike center, uprising like fungi from the swampy soil. Behold, as the power and glory of the monarch redoubled,--no less than thirty thousand workmen engaged in enlarging and beautifying the residence of His Majesty, while a regiment of Swiss Guards dig out the lake. And when pneumonia, fever, and ague carry off so many thousands of these hapless toilers that the dead have to be carted away by night, and secretly dumped into pits dug for the purpose, and the bottoms of the Royal coffers are seen through a thinning layer of gold, and the Building Accounts of the Crown Demesne show totals of unpaid debts sufficiently colossal to stagger a lightning-calculator, and Ministers grow dizzy, seeing a Kingdom on the brink of financial ruin, the sublime forehead beneath the bediamonded hat and the towering wig is illuminated by an inspiration. "Ha! We have it! Quick! commence new works! Pile on the national taxes, press a million unpaid laborers into the Royal service. Let rivers of tears flow to swell the sources of our dwindling fountains. Upon the uncounted corpses of vulgar toilers erect fresh monuments to all the glories of France!"