“THERE IS NO LAW––”
The wild and drunken madness of the triumphant people expended itself in many strange forms, of which none was stranger, more awesome, more ludicrous and yet more tragic than the Carmagnole.
This was a dance that seized whole multitudes in its rhythmic, swaying clutch. The tune was “Ca Ira!” that mad measure of the sansculottes, meaning roughly––
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“Here it goes–– “And there it goes!” |
––and go forever it did till all the world of Paris seemed a heaving, throbbing vortex of werewolves and witches, things lower than animals in their topsyturvydom, drunken frenzy and frequent obscenity.
The throng through which Henriette now directed her steps was verging on this madness, though not yet at the pitch of it.
Henriette managed to find her way to two sansculotte troopers stationed in the centre of the Place, to whom she told her story. Reasonable fellows they seemed, offering to conduct her presently to the new 115 authorities and get a search warrant for the Frochard clan. But the madder swirl of the Carmagnole came along, and presto! swallowed them up. It happened on this wise:
As the locust swarms of the dancers enveloped them in shortening circles, two young and attractive maenads broke from the throng and literally entwined themselves with the troopers. Military dignity, assaulted in burlesque, tried to keep its post. But the bold nymphs were clinging, not to be “shaken”; as the mad whirl of the dancers touched the centre, the troopers and their female captors were borne away in the ricocheting, plunging motions, disappearing thenceforward from our story. Little Henriette dived to a place of safety, the side wall of the nearest building. Straightening herself after the unexpected knocks and bruises, she looked aghast at the scene before her.
Whole streets of them, plazas of them, these endlessly gyrating male and female loons; swirls of gayety, twisting, upsetting passers-by like a cyclone;––arms, bodies and legs frantically waving, as at the very brink of Dante’s Inferno!
Strange little dramas of lust and conquest punctuated the cyclonic panorama. Here, a girl’s snapping black eyes, winking devilishly, and pursed-up Cupid mouth invited a new swain to master her. There, a short-skirted beauty, whose sways and kicks revealed bare thighs, was dancing wildly a solo intended to infatuate further two rival admirers. Again, a half-crazed sansculotte had won a girl and in token of triumph was spinning her body horizontally around like a top, upheld by the open palm of his huge right arm.
But what might be this comic figure, quite unpartnered––knocked and shoved from human pillar to human post––winning the deep curses of the dancers, and their hearty wallops when not o’er-busied with Terpsichore?
Picard, the ex-valet of aristocracy, finally let out from the Salpetriere mock-court, had stumbled into this bedlam of sansculotte craziness, the rhythm and procedure of which were as foreign to him as a proposition in Euclid.
But the Jolly Baker, from the Ile de Paris, was his match. The bare-armed, lean-legged pleasurer had equipped himself 117 (by way of disguise) with a large false moustache, and evading the close watch of his hatchet-faced, middle-aged spouse, had come forth to celebrate. Neither dancer nor vocalist, the Jolly Baker had other little entertaining ways all his own.
As the foolscap-crowned, white-and-red-trousered Picard bumped the pave, he saw squatting opposite him a figure whose gleaming eyes, ferocious whiskerage and lean-wiry frame suggested the canine rather than the human species. The Jolly Baker was a bum werewolf, but a “hot dog.”
The gleaming eyes never left Picard’s face, the dog-like body jumped whichever way he did, Picard half expected the dog-man to bite or snap the next instant and take a chunk out of him. Both had got to their feet now; the stranger still silent and nosey, Picard looking out of the corner of his eye for a way of escape. But just then the Baker spied a maenad with a drum.
One could beat drum in celebration, if naught else. Lo and behold, the posterior of the foolscapped one would serve for a drum very nicely! The Jolly Baker twisted 118 Picard around, bending him half double as he did so.
With a rear thrust and firm shoulder grip, the Jolly Baker leaped upon Picard’s back. Emulating the young woman’s beating of the drum, he rained a shower of blows on the valet’s hind quarters.
The new “drum”-beater was now quite the cynosure of admiring attention. He had captured the centre of the stage. He gloried in it. With a more elaborate, fanciful and complexive “rat-tat-tat-rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat––”
He suddenly lost his grip of the “human drum,” Picard wriggled out from under, and the drummer bumped his own posterior on the pave.
Calmly, quite undisturbed, the foolish Baker continued to “rat-tat-tat” with a stick on the curb, then as the “Ca Ira” beats resounded above him, his own squatting body began to sway with the music in a heightened absurdity. Picard had run off. He was convinced these people were crazier than any of those in the mad cells of Salpetriere....
JACQUES FORGET-NOT, SWEARS VENGEANCE ON THE FAMILY OF THE DE VAUDREYS.
THE COUNT DE LINIERES AND THE CHEVALIER DE VAUDREY HEAR HIS THREATS.
Long since Henriette had evaded the worse sights and sounds by creeping as best she could along the side walls of the buildings, watching her chance to get away from the revelers. Again, at the street corner, another swirl passed over her, knocking her down. Ruefully she picked herself up again.
The throng had passed by completely, leaving but a drunken fool prancing here and there, or a scant winrow of half-prostrate figures. Henriette ran with all her might to the only refuge she knew––her old faubourg lodgings.
The middle-aged landlady who in days agone had fetched the guard to subdue Danton’s would-be assassins, and who likewise had resented Robespierre’s prying as to the identity of Henriette’s visitor, studied the girl at first a bit quizzically. Released from Salpetriere, eh? Was she the same sweet, pure Henriette she knew? Yes, the little Girard––la petite Girard––looked to be the same hard-working, respectable seamstress person of yore, only that she seemed very weak and about to collapse!
The landlady folded Henriette within one stout arm.
She pointed with her free hand to the bedchamber immediately above.
“Your old room up there awaits you,” she remarked kindly. “As soon as you have recovered strength a bit, I have no doubt the old sewing job will be yours too!”
... Jacques-Forget-Not and his men arrived too late at the Prefect’s palace for complete vengeance on the de Vaudreys.
Around the historic Fourteenth of July, there was a pell-mell exodus of aristocrats from the city. A panic-stricken servant brought the Count de Linieres tidings of the people’s victory.
“Fly, monsieur! Fly, madame!” he cried. “The troops are overthrown, the Bastille surrounded, before nightfall the mob will surely attack here and try to kill your excellencies. Fly, I implore you!”
Other messengers confirmed the news, and thus it happened that the erstwhile proud and arrogant Minister of Police who but yesterday had ruled France was reduced to making the most hurried preparations for flight, aided by the distracted Countess.
The latter realized with a pang that the 121 hegira meant farewell, perhaps forever, to the chance of recovering her lost daughter Louise from this welter of Paris. How mysterious the ways of the Higher Power! Her beloved nephew the Chevalier, at least, was safe in the distant fortress to which the Count her husband had condemned him. Pray God Louise might be saved––, yes! and her foster-sister Henrietta, beloved of the Chevalier––Henriette whom her husband had branded by unjust accusation....
The de Linieres party succeeded in evading the fate of numbers of the runaway aristocrats, who were bodily pulled out of their coaches and trampled upon or strung up by the infuriated mobs. They managed to make their way to the northeastern borders of France. There thousands of emigres were received under the protection of foreign powers, awaiting the ripe moment for the impact of foreign armies on French soil and the hoped-for reconquest of the monarchists....
That night the beautiful Hotel de Vaudrey––home of the Vaudrey and Linieres family and fortune––was given up to sack and pillage. Enraged that the objects of 122 his vengeance had fled, the leader Forget-Not ordered a general demolition.
Priceless works of art were hurled about and destroyed. The cellars of old wines were quickly emptied by drunken revelers. The kitchen and pantries catered to the mob’s gluttony. Wenches arrayed themselves in the Countess’s costly silks and linens; perfumed, powdered and painted with the cosmetics; preened and perked in the cheval mirrors.
Among the motley crew of destroyers, drunkards, gluttons, satyrs and sirens, our friend the Jolly Baker was on the job––unfortunately for him, accompanied this time by his hatchet-faced spouse.
He started a flirtation with a new-made vamp, all tricked out in stolen finery. The Jolly Baker had found a new use for his eyes and eyebrows, i.e., to convey love messages. He was making the most alarming motions and succeeding most prodigiously in evoking the new vamp’s answering smiles when––
“Ker-plunk!”
––Dame Baker fetched him a tremendous slap directly on the face that caused him to see innumerable little stars.
Gradually coming back to this mundane world, the Jolly Baker resolved to devote his strict attention to the bottle....