CHAPTER XXXV
OUT OF NIGHT INTO THE NIGHT
“Willst du, dass trotz Sturm und Graus
In die Nacht ich muss hinaus—
Willst du, dass ich geh’?”
—Lemcke
And while M. des Graves was saying to Louis de Chantemerle, on that Saturday morning, the 2nd of March, what he had it in his mind to say, there was travelling rapidly to Fontenay a special courier from Paris with a thunderbolt in his pocket. That explosive he should the same evening deliver to the Directory, and these seven individuals should then and there proceed to give effect to the measure that was to be the match to fire the waiting tinder. And before they slept the printing presses of the town should be busy on it, and on Isnard’s “Address to the French People,” setting up with approbation, for all their haste, those rolling phrases: “France is about to fight alone against an enslaved Europe. . . . Let the country districts retain none of their sons but such as are indispensable. . . . Before our fields can be improved they must be set free. . . .” In such language did the Convention commend its decree for the levying of three hundred thousand conscripts.
There are, perhaps, no such things as political bolts from the blue. Such projectiles fall usually from a clouded sky, upon the heads of persons who have already discerned threatening atmospheric symptoms. But whether the peasants of Vendée had or had not been looking skywards, the decree struck them with fearful force. . . . Should they, to whom the very name of Blue was execrable—whether applied to National Guard or to soldier of the line—should they be forced to enroll themselves in the ranks of the men to whom they owed the carrying out of more than two years of persecution and vexation? Were they, the most stay-at-home, possibly, of all the peasantry of France, to be forced to leave their homesteads to fight on the frontiers? The hated words of conscription and tirage au sort were not indeed mentioned in the decree, but they had already been spoken in the Assembly, and since the drawing of lots was the simplest method of forced recruiting, to that method it would come in the end. From the moment when the news struck the inhabitants of the town of Cholet, busy on that Saturday in their weekly market, the cry rang hot through all the countryside: “Down with the tirage!” “We will not give our names!” The tinder was alight.
But the inner mental atmosphere of a house is sometimes so charged with emotion as to resist the pressure of outer conditions, and to one inmate at least of the château the breath of nearing revolt brought with it, after all, nothing of exultation. So, on the Wednesday evening, Louis was sitting on the edge of his bed hardly heeding the disjointed tale of some affray which Jasmin poured out as he pulled off his master’s boots. At any other time it would have been exceedingly welcome to the young man, but now——
“That will do, Jasmin,” he said. He got up and threw off his coat and waistcoat. “No, I don’t want you any more now. Give me my dressing-gown and my slippers, and don’t come back till I ring.”
“Monsieur le Vicomte is not ill?” queried Jasmin anxiously, as he held out the flowered silk.