These were a straw or two in the torrent of the revolution.
* * * * * * *
It was Citizen Gaspardin who accepted the contract to remove the carcasses (some three thousand of them) that encumbered the Place Royale as a result of this drastic measure. However, his eye being bigger than his stomach, as the saying is, he found himself short of means adequate to his task and so applied for the royal equipages to help him out of his difficulty. And these the Assembly, entering into the joke, was moved to lend him; and the dead dogs, hearsed in gilt and gingerbread as full as they could pack, made a rare procession of it through Paris, thereby pointing half-a-dozen morals that it is not worth while at this date to insist on.
I saw the show pass amidst laughter and clapping of hands; and I saw Radegonde, as I thought, her head lolling from the roof of the stateliest coach of all. But her place should have been on the seat of honour.
And the citoyenne, the dark window, the ripping sound in the street, and that bosom bursting to mine in agony? Episodes, my friend—mere travelling sparks in dead ashes, that glowed an instant and vanished. The times bristled with such. Love and hate, and all the kaleidoscope of passion—pouf! a sigh shook the tube, and form and colour were changed.
But—but—but—ah! I was glad thenceforth not to shudder for my heart when a blonde perruque went by me.
CHAPTER X.
THE AFFAIR OF THE CANDLES.
Gardel—one of the most eminent and amusing rascals of my experience—is inextricably associated with my memories of the prison of the Little Force. He had been runner to the Marquis de Kercy; and that his vanity would by no means deny, though it should procure his conviction ten times over. He was vivacious, and at all expedients as ingenious as he was practical; and, while he was with us, the common-room of La Force was a theatre of varieties.
By a curious irony of circumstance, it fell to Madame, his former châtelaine, to second his extravagances. For he was her fellow-prisoner; and, out of all that motley, kaleidoscopic assemblage, an only representative of the traditions of her past. She indulged him, indeed, as if she would say, “In him, mes amis, you see exemplified the gaieties that I was born to patronise and applaud.”
She was a small, faded woman, of thirty-five or so—one of those colourless aristocrats who, lying under no particular ban, were reserved to complete the tale of any fournée that lacked the necessary number of loaves. It is humiliating to be guillotined because fifty-nine are not sixty. But that, in the end, was her fate.