“What do you mean?”
“Leaving epigrams aside, I mean that there not being means enough for quitting life, he is inventing a very ingenious machine which he reckons to present to his fellow countrymen, to put fifty or eighty persons to death in an hour. Well, my dear Gilbert, do you believe that so human a philanthropist, so distinguished a physician as Dr. Louis Guillotin, would busy himself about such an instrument unless he felt the want of it?
“I know that this is not so much a novelty as a machine forgotten, as a proof of which I showed it as an image in a glass of water to Marie Antoinette. She was then espoused to the Dauphin of France, now its sovereign, and it was down at Taverney where you were a dependent. The old baron was alive then, and the lady of the manor was Mdlle. Andrea.”
“Ah,” sighed Gilbert at this reminder of his boyhood.
“But at the first you had eyes only for the servant-maid, Nicole, afterwards Olive Legay, as the Dauphiness, to whom she bore an amazing resemblance by the bye, is the Queen of France. Well I repeat that the future Queen was shown by me this instrument to which I shall suggest no name, though the olden ones are the Maiden, the Widow and the Mannaya in my country. The thing so alarmed her that she swooned dead away. It was in limbo at the era, but you shall see it at work presently if it be successful; and then you must be blind if you do not spy the hand of heaven in it all, it being foreseen that the time would come when the headsman would have his hands too full and that a new method must be devised.”
“Count, your remarks were more consoling when we were in America.”
“I should rather think they were! I was in the midst of a people who rose and here in society which falls. In our Old World, all march towards the grave, nobility and royalty, and this grave is a bottomless pit.”
“Oh, I abandon the nobility to you, count, or rather it threw itself away in the night of the fourth of August; but the royalty must be saved as the national palladium.”
“Big words, my dear Gilbert: but did the palladium save Troy? Do you believe it will be easy to save the realm with such a king?”
“But in short he is the descendant of a grand race.”