I paid farewell visits to M. Lethière, and to M. de Leuven and to Oudard. Oudard wanted to retain me forcibly in Paris, or, rather, to despatch me to St. Petersburg with M. Athalin, who was going as Envoy Extraordinary to the Emperor Nicholas, he said. Here was the very opportunity for me to obtain the cross of the Légion d'honneur which I had missed at the last promotion, in spite of the letter M. le Duc d'Orléans had written to Sosthènes. I thanked Oudard and begged him to look upon me in future as in no way connected with the royal duke's administration. Oudard persisted strenuously in trying to make me renounce my resolution, and I left him genuinely grieved at my departure, which he knew very well meant a complete rupture. Finally, on 10 August, the day after the proclamation of the July Monarchy, I entered the diligence, very unhappy that I could not make up an equivalent for Paris of the farewell that Voltaire had made for Holland.[2]
Thus I started on the evening of 10 August in the grand uniform of a mounted National Guard. My first stop was at Blois; I wished to visit its bloodstained château, and I climbed the ladder-like streets which lead up to it. I hunted in vain for the equestrian statue of Louis XII. over the gateway, before which Madame de Nemours had stood weeping, craving vengeance for the murder of her two grandsons; I went into the courtyard, and admired that quadrangular enclosure built under four different reigns, each side showing a distinctly different style of architecture: the wing built by Louis XII., beautiful in its severe simplicity; that of François I., with its colonnades overloaded with ornamentation; Henri III.'s staircase, with carved open work; then, as a protest against the Gothic and Renaissance styles—against imagination and art, that is to say—the cold, tasteless building by Mansard, which the concierge kept pointing out to me persistently, amazed that anybody could admire anything but it in that marvellous courtyard! The rapidity with which I examined it, the kind of grimace that expressed itself involuntarily on my face by the unwonted curl of my lower lip, brought a smile of contempt to the honest fellow's lips, which I was not slow in justifying entirely, by refusing to believe his obstinate asseverations that a special spot was where the Duc de Guise was said to have been assassinated. True, I discovered, beyond reach of any doubt, at the other end of the apartment, which had been a dining hall, a secret staircase, by which the Duc de Guise had left the state room; the corridor which led to the king's private oratory; and everything, even to the very place where the duke must have fallen when Henri III., pale and imploring, lifted the tapestry curtain and asked in a whisper, "Messieurs, is it all over?" for it could only have been at that moment that the king caught sight of the blood flowing across the passage and saw that the soles of his slippers were soaked in it; then he came forward and gave the face of the poor dead body a kick with his heel,—just as the Duc de Guise in his turn had kicked the admiral on St. Bartholomew's Day,—then, drawing backward, as though alarmed at his courage, he said, "Good Lord! how tall he is! He looks taller lying down than upright, dead than alive!"[3]
Meantime, while I was remembering these things, the concierge was tenaciously endeavouring to bring me round to his way of thinking.
"But, monsieur, only you, and a big fair gentleman named M. Vitet, have ever disbelieved what I state," he said.
Then he went on to show me the fireplace where the bodies of the duke and cardinal had been cut in pieces and burnt; the window out of which the ashes of the two bodies had been scattered to the winds; the oubliettes made by Catherine de Médici, eighty feet deep, with their steel blades as sharp as razors, their cramp-irons as pointed as lances, so numerous and so artistically arranged in spirals that a man who fell from above would be a creature in God's image the moment before falling, but, losing a piece of flesh or some member of his body at each impact, would be nothing but a shapeless, hacked-up mass by the time he reached the bottom, upon which quicklime was thrown the next day in order to consume the remains. And the whole of this castle, the royal palace of the Valois, with its memories of assassination and its marvellous art treasures, was now the barracks of the cuirassiers, who reeled about drinking and singing; who, in their transports of love or patriotism, scraped with the point of their long swords some charming bit of carving by Jean Goujon in order to write on the wood thus planed down, "I love Sophie!" or "Long live Louis-Philippe!"[4]
When I left the château I took the mail-coach, and reached Tours that same night. People there could talk of nothing but the arrests of MM. de Peyronnet, of Chantelauze and of Guernon-Ranville; a host of details concerning these arrests were related to me with exultant volubility, which details shall be given in their due time and place. I continued my journey by steamer, and when I arrived at Ponts-de-Cé I landed in order to go to Angers. Here I had a friend named Victor Pavie, an excellent young fellow, warm-hearted and true. What has become of him now? I don't in the least know; I have hardly ever seen him since then. When I arrived at his house I learnt that he was at a sitting of the Assizes. They were trying a poor devil of a Vendean, from Beauprèau, who had silvered Republican sous with quicksilver, and tried to pass them off for thirty-sous pieces. The poor wretch's object in coining false money was to buy food for his starving children. A great interest was felt in the prisoner throughout the whole town; but at that date the penalty for false coining was terribly severe: it was not merely a matter of warning that I bank-notes bore an inscription threatening sentence of death on any who tried to forge them. In spite of the simplicity of his confession, and the tears of his wife and children, and the pleading of his counsel, the accused was sentenced to between twenty and thirty years' penal servitude. I was present when the sentence was passed, and, like everyone else, I received my share of the blow which smote the poor wretch. While I listened to that sentence, which, although severe, was not illegal, the idea came to me that Providence had sent me there on purpose to save the man. I returned to Pavie's house, and, without saying a word to anyone, I wrote two letters: one to Oudard, the other to Appert. I believe I have already mentioned Appert and have said that he was almoner of the private charities of the Duchesse d'Orléans. I laid the case before them and begged them to ask for the pardon of the condemned man: the one of the king, the other of the queen. I laid great stress upon the good effect, politically, an act of clemency towards a Vendean would produce, at a time when there was reason to fear trouble from that quarter of the country. I made known to both of them that I looked upon my petition as so just that I should remain at Angers until I obtained a favourable reply. Whilst waiting, I explored all the town and neighbourhood under Pavie's guidance. Excellent fellow, Pavie! He pointed out to me, with an indignation most characteristic of his national love of art, some workmen, who, by order of the préfet, under the direction of a local architect, were busy converting the grotesque figures on the cathedral into brackets! So what you now see, to your great satisfaction, if you do not appreciate the wonderful grimacing faces which the Middle Ages fixed to its cathedrals, is a Roman entablature upheld by Grecian brackets after the model of those on the Bourse, another modern marvel, a mixture of Greek and Roman styles, with nothing French about it but its stove-pipes. Furthermore, they were scraping the cathedral remorselessly without any respect for the brown colouring that eight centuries had spread over its surface; and this scraping gave it a sickly paleness which they called "rejuvenating it"! Alas! it takes twenty-five years to complete a man: a good Swiss royalist may fire upon him, and then he is killed! It takes six or eight centuries to colour a building, and then an architect with good taste arrives, and scrapes it!... Why does not the Swiss kill the architect? or why doesn't the architect scrape the Swiss? We went down to the promenade, and I walked past the tenth-century ancient castle, which is encircled by a moat and flanked by a dozen massive towers—the labour of a people, the asylum for an army. "Ah!" my poor Pavie said, sighing, "they are going to pull it down.... It spoils the view!"
On that day I received a letter from Oudard telling me the pardon was granted, and that only the formalities to be gone through with the Minister of Justice would retard the liberation of the prisoner; so I hastened to share the letter with the person most directly interested in its contents, and, nothing further detaining me at Angers, I jumped into a passing carriage, so great was my wish to quit a town of Vandal destroyers, and I was driven to Ponts-de-Cé.
To save Angers still further maledictions, let it be mentioned that it was the birthplace of Béclard and of David. Upon the journey we passed through a long village, called, I believe, la Mercerie; they were inaugurating a new mayor. Two worn old pieces of cannon, which exploded by the vent, saluted as we entered. Every house displayed its flag, and we passed under a tricolour canopy. The mayor and all his family were on the balcony, and the youthful mayoress, who, in her affection for his people, had stepped close to the edge of the terrace, looked to be the possessor of a very fine pair of legs; I cannot speak for her face, as the perpendicular position she occupied with regard to me prevented me from catching a sight of it.
The spot that I had picked out for my centre of operations was a small farmhouse belonging to M. Villenave. I have mentioned this farm before; it lay between Clisson and Torfou, and was called la Jarrie. Madame Waldor had been living there the last three or four months with her mother and daughter. My plan was to reach my objective by describing a large circle and touching Chemillé, Chollet and Beaupréau on my way. By this means, when I should finally reach la Jarrie, I should already have gained some idea of the temper of the country, and should know how to go to work upon individuals and also upon the people collectively. I intended to go short stages at a time, to stop just where fancy took me, to leave at the hours that should suit my own convenience and to stay when it pleased me to remain. There was, therefore, no other means of transport to adopt than to buy or hire a horse; for it was out of the question for me, wearing the uniform of the mounted National Guard, to go afoot. This uniform and a second, which was a shooting suit, was all the wardrobe I had thought it convenient to bring away with me. I hired a horse at Meurs. I stopped one day there to pay a visit to the battlefield of Ponts-de-Cé. There, in 1438, the Angevins defeated the English; and in 1620 Maréchal de Créquy defeated the troops of Marie de Médici; finally, in 1793, the Republicans were defeated here by the Vendeans—defeated, though with difficulty, since they were Republicans. That defeat of 26 July 1793 was a great one, a defeat equal to one of those that made Leonidas immortal, and yet nobody knows who was Commander Bourgeois. When it is my good fortune to come across one of these forgotten names upon my journey, names buried in the dust of the past, I take it up and breathe upon it till it shines out conspicuously before my contemporaries. It is both my right and my duty, the more so as Bourgeois is one of those brave heroes of '93 who are slandered when not forgotten.
After the rout of Vihiers, whilst our army was trying to reorganise itself again at Chinon, Bourgeois, who was in command of the 8th Parisian battalion, the one that was called the Lombard battalion, received orders to leave Ponts-de-Cé and to occupy the rock of Meurs. It was an odious position: to the north, the perpendicular rock, commanding one arm of the Louet, a little river which runs into the Loire; to the west, a small plain of undulating ground; to the south, a ravine, at the bottom of which the Aubance flows; on the other side were the heights of Mozé, of Soulaines and of Derrée. When camped on that unlucky plain, there is no possible way of retreat if one is attacked in front and on the flank. But the command was given, and he had to obey it. Bourgeois and his four hundred men were encamped on the rock of Meurs.