And one of these kept barking at my heel: “Carinne, that you were impotent to defend! What has become of the child?”
CHAPTER II.
CITOYENNE CARINNE.
It was my unhappiness in the black spring-time of the “Terror” to see my old light acquaintance, the Abbé Michau, jogging on his way to the Place de la Bastille. I pitied him greatly. He had pursued Pleasure so fruitlessly all his days; and into this fatal quagmire had the elusive flame at length conducted him. He sat on the rail of the tumbril—a depressed, puzzled look on his face—between innocence and depravity. Both were going the same road as himself—the harmless white girl and the besotted priest, who shrunk in terror from giving her the absolution she asked;—and poor Charles divided them.
He was not ever of Fortune’s favourites. He would make too fine an art of Epicurism, and he sinned so by rule as to be almost virtuous. I remember him with a half-dozen little axioms of his own concocting, that were after all only morality misapplied: “To know how to forget oneself is to be graduate in the school of pleasure.” “Self-consciousness is always a wasp in the peach.” “The art of enjoyment is the art of selection.” On such as these he founded his creed of conduct; and that procured him nothing but a barren series of disappointments. He was never successful but in extricating himself from mishaps. The ravissantes he sighed after played with and insulted him—though they could never debase his spirit. The dishes he designed lacked the last little secret of perfection. He abhorred untidiness, yet it was a condition of his existence; and he could not carry off any situation without looking like a thief. One further turn of the wheel, and he would have been a saint in a monastery.
I can recall him with some tenderness, and his confident maxims with amusement. That “art of selection” of his I found never so applicable as to the choice of one’s Revolutionary landlord. It was Michau’s logeur, I understand, who caused the poor Abbé to be arrested and brought before the tribunal miscalled of Liberty, where the advocacy of the chivalrous Chauveau de la Garde was sufficient only to procure him the last grace of an unproductive appeal. It was the atrocity with whom latterly I lodged who brought me to my final pass.
In truth, as the letters of apartments were largely recruited from the valetaille of émigrés, the need of caution in choosing amongst them was very real. M. le Marquis could not take flight in a panic without scattering some of his fine feathers—fortunately, indeed, for him sometimes, for they were as sops thrown to the pursuing wolves while he sped on. Then, down would grovel public accusers, police, and committee-men to snap at the fragments; and amongst them Bon-Jean, Monsieur’s valet de pied, would secure his share, perhaps, and set up house with it in one of the meaner faubourgs, and trade profitably therein upon the fears of his lodgers.
Simon Mignard was the last who had the honour to entertain me; and to that horrible little grotesque did I owe my subsequent lodgment in La Petite Force. It was a bad choice, and, with my experience, an unpardonable; but I was taken with a certain humour in the creature that put me off my judgment.
For generally, indeed, this faculty of humour I found to be antipathetic to revolution. It was to be looked upon as a mark of social degeneration. The brute “thrown back” to his primordial state is an animal that takes himself with the most laughterless gravity. He resumes himself corrupt, so to speak, as one resumes the endurance of office full of the rebellious grievance of a holiday. He returns to the primary indulgence of instinct with a debased appetite, and that sense of humour does not accompany him. This is why his prejudices have the force of convictions.
“Citizen Simon,” I said one day, “I would put it to you—if revolutionists would reconstitute society by purging the world of the abnormal, should they not offer themselves the first holocausts to their theories?”
“Hey?” he cried, peering over his glasses. His eye-slits were like half-healed wounds; his face was all covered with a grey down, as if he were some old vessel of wrath the Revolution had produced from its mustiest blood-bin in the cellars where its passions were formerly wont to ferment.