“And find that others before you have taken the pick of the fair while you ecstatically considered, and that you have at the last paid full price for a discarded residue.”
“What, then, my friend! I shall be richer than the prudent by measure of a whole feast of anticipation—more satisfied, if less gorged. The early bird eats his chicken in the egg. (Corne de Dieu! there is a fine marriage of proverbs!) He has nothing to look forward to but a day of blank satiety. I cannot at once have the dreams of youth and the sober retrospections of age.”
So he would talk ex curia, a dilatory, lovable vagabond, with a rare power of enchantment drawn from some hidden depths, as from a fern-curtained well. Perhaps this sensuous personal charm—whereby he would appear to flatter with signal affectionate regard each in turn of his numerous acquaintances—would of itself have failed after the first to win a poor love-stricken from prolonged contemplation of any but his own interests. It was the man’s spasmodic revelations of unexpected virile forces held in reserve that would suddenly convert in another a little growing sentiment of tolerant disdain to an eager desire to be acclaimed friend by this subject of his condescension. So, may be, the force operated upon Ned. For succeeding his first gratification over an introduction to one in whom he had latterly prefigured the regenerator of France, came a thought of désagrément in his soul’s nominee, a feeling of disillusionment in which he was prepared to recognise another example of Fortune’s wanton baiting of his personal cherished ideals. Then one day he heard this seeming waiter on Providence, this almost coatless landholder of Utopia, speak in the Assembly; and thenceforth he had nothing but reverence for the ardent soul, whose misfortune only it was to be bounded by a love more human in its essence than divine. He had seen the familiar figure sitting with its hand over its face; he had next seen the face revealed from the tribune, inspired, transformed, as if the hand itself, consecrate as a priest’s, had touched and wrought the priestly sacrament of confirmation; and the sermon of high government that followed had taken wings of fire from the burning spirit that informed it; and the hearts of men had kindled and glowed, flaring at length—alas, too self-consumingly!—into roaring flame.
Well, such moments were for Ned’s holiday moods. This present friendship and admiration saved him, perhaps, from hobnobbing with more harmfully potent spirits. Yet the one enthusiasm could galvanise him only fitfully into an interest in the passionate scenes amongst which he moved. So negative a pole is love—when turned from the north-star of its hopes—to all that in less misconverted circumstances would attract it. Here was he a spectator at last of the stupendous drama in the early rehearsals of which he had been so profoundly interested; and he had nothing for it all but a lack-lustre eye, which he must always keep from turning inwards by an effort. He lived, in fact, in a little miserable tub of his own choosing, while the Alexanders of a political renaissance made history around, and unregarded of, him.
Much time he spent moodily gazing from the windows of his lodgings in the Rue St Honoré. Thence looking, his life seemed to become a dream of motley crowds always drifting by. Stolid, tight-buttoned guards, with brigand moustaches like dolls’; frowzy revolutionary conscripts, swaggering to glory; tattered deputations, exhibiting the seals of their memorials in the shape of old blood-stains dried upon arms and faces, and headed, perhaps, by some trimly arrogant sectional president, with his sleek hair and tricolour sash—vociferous or intent, in noisome clouds they floated by; and Ned could seldom rescue so much curiosity from the heart of his self-centred indifference as to inquire what was their destination or significance. A shoddy Paris—a Paris of gaudy fustian. So far a certain general impression seemed bitten into him; and, desultorily moved by it, he would rarely wake to a little rhapsodical song of lamentation over yet another shattered ideal. This city and this people that he had loved, and of which and whom he had expected and prophesied so noble a triumph of self-emancipation! Now the tangled mazes of “party” differences seemed designed only to render the central cause unattainable. Now, he would think, the history of their municipal government was always to be likened to the story of an iceberg—a story of top-heaviness periodically recurring—of base and summit exchanging positions again and again, the depths replacing the head, the head the depths. And did it signify, as in the iceberg, a steady attenuation, a bulk of force and grandeur constantly lessening? God save France, and exorcise the sluggard demon in Pierre-Victorin!
By-and-by, sick at last of inaction, the poor fellow took to the streets, restlessly traversing all quarters of the city—its bye-lanes, its loaded thoroughfares—both by day and lamp-light. Once he made his way to the now ancient ruins of the Bastille, and dully leaving them after a dull inspection—or rather retrospection—looked half curiously up at his old lodgings, yet had not the spirit to visit them and Madame Gamelle. Once a languid thrill penetrated his torpor upon his chancing upon view of an old acquaintance, the Chevalier d’Eon, so queerly associated with a certain episode in his vanished life. He passed the strange creature in the Thuilleries gardens, whither he had come years ago to see a balloon ascend. She stared him full in the face, but without recognition, as she went by. Her eyes bagged in their sockets; she looked old and shabby—an improvident actress retired upon scant savings. Already her gaze had grown unspeculative; the first menace of senility suggested itself in the drooping of her fat old jaw. She had come over from England, Ned learned, a year ago, to petition the National Assembly—in the days before its dissolution—for leave to resume her helmet and her sabre and to serve in the army. Her request had received the double honour of applause and of relegation to the official minutes—where it slept forgotten. The poor chevalier must consign herself gracefully to oblivion—which no actor or actress ever did. She lived on at Paris a few months longer—a decaying old body with a grievance; then returned for the last time to England, where, dying by-and-by in poverty, and being handed over to the final merciless inquisition of the mortuary, she was adjudged—a male impostor, and so committed to a dishonoured grave.
Upon Egalité (but recently so designated) Ned happened from time to time, yet only to understand that this would-be popular constituent was resolved upon “cutting” him, a titled aristocrat, from popular motives. Therefore, despite the gnawing of the fox of anxiety at his ribs, the young Englishman, in his pride, would make no appeal to the man who alone could ease his torment; but he endeavoured to ascertain, through indirect report, what were the chances of an early return to Paris on the part of certain notable emigrants; and in the meantime he must settle himself down, with what remnants of philosophy he could command, to a life of miserable inaction and irresolution.
Then, once upon a day, behold! into his field of vision, the spectrum of a ghost more remotely haunting than any familiar to his recenter experience, flashed Théroigne, “Our Lady of Darkness,” the realised presentment of a destiny long foreshadowed. And henceforth it was as if he had been hurled into one of those red arteries of fatality (of which the just-erected guillotine was as the throbbing heart) that laced the city in all directions.
He was strolling with Vergniaud, again in the Thuilleries gardens. It was a day of lazy sunshine, and the walks and grass-plots were crowded. Paris must laugh and breathe, though in the committee rooms yonder the whirring machinery of election to the new National Convention was shaking the whole town; though forty-seven out of the forty-eight sections, with their tag-rag and bob-tail, were howling for the king’s abdication through all the courts of the city; though the shadow of the Brunswicker and his emigrants was already projecting itself, like a devil’s search-light, from a contracting horizon; though hate, and terror, and fanaticism were crouching in every corner with smouldering linstocks in their hands. The babble was not less, or less animated, for this. Children sailed their boats on the ponds, or played ball about the grass. It was a scene of light and good-humour.
Against the terrace of the Feuillans, to the north of the gardens, the strollers came upon the first sign of a serpent in this Eden—a long, broad, tricolour ribbon stretched from tree to tree, and bearing the inscription, “Tyran, notre colère tient à un ruban; ta couronne tient à un fil.”