"But I am willing to make reparation," he said.
The Councillor drew back under this new affront.
"You marry my daughter! You forget who you are, Monsieur de Robespierre! You, the husband of Mademoiselle de Pontivy! Enough, sir, and do as I have said!"
The departure of young Robespierre took place as the Councillor desired. No one had the slightest suspicion of the real reason, and Clarisse, who was suffering from a severe attack of brain fever, kept her bed.
In refusing to give the hand of his daughter, even dishonoured, to any one who was not of her rank, Monsieur de Pontivy was but true to his principles, to his own code of morals, based upon caste prejudice and foolish pride.
Could he have read the future of the young man he would not have acted otherwise, and yet that young man was destined to become one of the masters of France—but at what a price and under what conditions!
Nineteen years had passed since then, nineteen years in which events succeeded each other with a rapidity and violence unparalleled in the previous history of Europe. The excesses of an arbitrary government, added to universal discontent, had led to the Revolution. But this act of deliverance and social regeneration was unhappily to develop even worse excesses. The Reign of Terror was now raging. Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette had perished on the scaffold, followed by a large number of nobles and priests, victims of the tempest now at flood, and drowning in its crimson tide numberless victims with no respect of persons. The whole nation, in the country and in Paris, was perishing in the iron grasp of a new and more despotic government. Terror, monstrous parody of liberty, ruled the State, which was adrift without rudder on the storm, while all its people were driven to distraction by wild advocates of the guillotine.
Prominent among these fanatics, raised to power by the very suddenness of events, was Maximilien de Robespierre, once the young secretary of Monsieur de Pontivy, now styled simply Robespierre, President of the National Assembly, or Convention, the most powerful and most dreaded of the twelve conventionnels who, under the name of members of the Committee of Public Safety, ruled the destinies of France.
History is the romance of nations, more abundant in wild improbabilities than the most extravagant fairy tale; and the French Revolution stands out from the events which have perplexed the mind of man since the world began, a still unsolved enigma. The actors in this fearful drama move like beings of some other sphere, the produce of a wild imagination, the offspring of delirium, created to astound and stupefy. And it was the destiny of the secretary of Monsieur de Pontivy to become one of these. Still in the prime of his life, scarcely thirty-six, he was one of the principal if not the chief personage of the Revolution.
However signal his success, the course of events left him unchanged. During the slow accession of a man to the summit of human aspiration, his deficiences are sometimes dwarfed and his powers developed and strengthened; but the foundation remains the same—just as trees which ever renew their leaves, and absorb from the same soil a perennial flow of life.