By way of Fumay—a little pretty town situate on a river holm, and overhung by a group of stately rocks called the Ladies of the Meuse—Ned, adopting the advice of the Comte de Lawoestine, entered France. At once—as if, from easy gliding down a stream, he had been drawn into and was rushing forward in the midst of rapids—his days became mere records of anxiety and turbulence that constantly intensified throughout every league of his approach towards Paris. At the very frontier, indeed, he had taken the plunge, as exemplified in his change of postilions. To the last village on the German side he had been driven by a taciturn barbarian—a cheese-featured Westphalian, picturesque, malodorous, and imperturbably uncivil. This certificated lout was dressed in a yellow jacket, having black cuffs and cape, and carried a saffron sash about his waist and a little bugle horn slung over his shoulder—the whole signifying the imperial livery of the road, then as sacred from assault as is the uniform of a modern soldier of the Fatherland. Tobacco, trinkgeld, and the unalienable right to keep his parts of speech locked up in the beer-cellar of his stomach—these appeared to be the three conditions of his service. Ned parted from him with a league-long-elaborated anathema that sounded as ineffective in the delivery as the rap of a knuckle on a full hogshead, and so, on the farther side of the border, committed himself to a first experience of the “patriot” postboy.
From the smooth and muddy into the broken water! Here was volubility proportionate with the other’s gross reticence. Jacques was no less picturesque and malodorous than was Hans. He had his private atmosphere, like the German; only it was eloquent of pipes and garlic rather than of pipes and beer. He spat and gabbled all day; and he was dressed, like a stage pirate, in a short brown coat with brass buttons, and in striped pink and white pantaloons tucked into half-boots. A sash went round his waist also, and he wore on his head a scarlet cap having a cockade. Ned was feverishly interested in this his first introduction to a child of the new liberty; but he would fain have found him inclined to a lesser verbosity. However, he was a cheerful rascal and a good-humoured, and his easy sangfroid helped the traveller out of an occasional tangle of the red-tapeism that he found immeshing official processes rather more intricately under a republican than under an autocratic form of government.
Ned’s journey to the capital was, indeed, a race a little perilous and full of excitement. The common spirit, or suggestion, of suppressed effervescence that had been his former experience, was revealed now a spouting, tingling fountain, light yet heady, hissing with froth and bubbles. The kennels of France ran, as it were, with sparkling wine, and the very mayfly of moral intoxication was hatched from them in swarms. Thoughts, words, acts; the habits of dress, of motion, of regard—all were the characteristics of an hysteria the result of unaccustomed indulgence—the result of reckless drinking at the released spring. One could never know if a chance expression—either of speech or feature—would procure one a madly laughing or a madly resentful acknowledgment. Exultation and terror walked arm-in-arm by the ways, each trying stealthily to trip up the other. It was an insane land, and now verging on a paroxysm of mania; for it was known that at last the king—the man of shifty vision—was focussing his eyesight on the north-eastern border of his kingdom, whence loomed the shadow of foreign legions moving to his aid.
The north-eastern border! To enter the land of fury from such a direction was to invite one’s own destruction. Not even luck, recklessness, and unexceptionable passports might, perhaps, have saved Ned from the homicidal madness of a people wrought to fantastic fear, had it not been for a quick-witted post-boy’s genius in availing himself of the right occasions to apply them. This was his real good-fortune—that his own innate charm of manner, his patience and sweetness, his characteristic unaffectedness in the matter of his rank, and his healing sense of humour in everything, found their response in the heart of the garrulous Jacques, and converted that amiable horse-emmet from an indifferent employé into a very fraternal road-companion.
So, through stress and danger, Ned sped on his journey, and—following for fifty leagues from the frontier in the track of the wrecking storm—was enabled to enter Paris, by the great Flanders road, some four days after his parting with M. le Comte de Lawoestine. Then—a final difficulty at the Temple barrier surmounted—he found himself once more a mean small condition of the life of that city to whose self-emancipatory throes he had once been a deeply concerned witness. And he accepted the fact without uneasiness, not knowing that before he should turn for the last time to quit the awful place of death and resurrection, the tragedy of his own life, in the midst of the thousands there enacting, should be consummated.
CHAPTER IX.
On the very day following that of his arrival, the pendulum of Ned’s particular destiny began its driving swing. He had taken good lodgings in a house in the Rue St Honoré, less, perhaps, as a concession to his rank than to his hypothetical prospects; and, issuing thence, after he had breakfasted, he had but a hundred yards to walk to reach a certain revolutionary centre that was become the goal to his long-drawn hopes and apprehensions.
It was a morning in early August, breathless and burning; and he turned into the gardens of the Palais Royal, that he might thus combine the opportunities to slake his thirst and to acquit himself of his commission to the royal proprietor of the adjoining palace. He had seated himself—unaccountably loath, now the moment was arrived, to put his fears to the proof—at a little café table under a tree, and was dreamily marvelling over the changed aspect of this plaisance of sedition (how in three years the temper of its habitués seemed to have altered, as it were, from that of a beleaguered to that of a triumphant garrison), when the familiar personality of one of three men who, talking together, strolled towards him, caught his immediate attention. Ugly, austere, with his Rowlandson paunch and unaffected neat clothes; with his wry jaw and crippled scuffle of speech—Ned saw here the unmistakable presentment of his whilom friend, the king’s painter. Between M. David and another—a tall, plebeian-dressed man, with a flawed, supercilious face, the blotched darkness of which (something caricaturing that of the monarch’s own) belied the mechanical amiability of its features—walked an individual of a very benignant and serene expression of countenance, the nobility of which showed in agreeable contrast with the moodiness of its neighbours’. This man—by many years the youngest of the three—was of the middle height, with dark sleepy eyes and chestnut hair. His face, slightly marked by the small-pox, was of a rather sensuous, rather wistful expression—at once pitiful and determined, with Love the modeller’s finger-marks about the mouth and, between the brows, the little long scar cut by thought. He was dressed in a very shabby and slovenly fashion, with limp tattered wristbands, and the seams of his coat burst at the shoulders; and even the lapels of his vest were dog’s-eared—altogether a display of poverty a little ostentatious, thought Ned (who, nevertheless, had reason by-and-by to correct his judgment). Yet, for all his appearance, here was the man of the three to whom the others, it seemed, paid deference; for they hung upon his words, their eyes bent to the ground, while he walked between them, frankly expounding and with a free aspect.
Now suddenly M. David glanced up and caught the Englishman’s gaze; and immediately, to Ned’s surprise (he had a vivid memory of their last rencontre), detached himself from his fellows and came forward with extended hand.
“Surely,” said the painter, “monsieur my friend the artist of the Thuilleries gardens!”