“More speechifying,” said Louis disgustedly. “Hang it! we shall have to go back and get out the other side. . . . No, here are some National Guards turning out of the Rue du Rempart.”
They went up to the outskirts of the crowd. The orator could be heard only intermittently; as far as could be gathered he was emitting a spouting stream of abuse directed, like a firehose, against the Tuileries, towards whose roofs, distinguishable across the Rue Saint-Honoré, he shook his fist. Such phrases as “Austrian Committee,” “chevaliers du poignard,” were indistinctly audible. Louis looked at the Marquis and silently shrugged his shoulders, but as the half-dozen National Guards began to cleave a way through the mob after their usual fashion, their muskets held horizontally at arms’ length above their heads, he beckoned to him and slipped into their wake. In the passage thus formed they ploughed a difficult way through the indignant crowd, a dirty member of which, suddenly shaking his fist under Gilbert’s nose with some passion, called him a swine of an aristocrat. The incident plainly afforded Louis a certain amount of pleasure, for, as he explained to his kinsman on their way down the Rue Nicaise, the Marquis would not be appreciated by the lower orders of Paris as greatly as he was at home.
They entered the palace by the great staircase in the Pavillon de l’Horloge, and had therefore to traverse the deserted state apartments before they could reach Madame Elisabeth’s quarters. The Salle des Suisses was empty, but in the Salle de l’Œil de Bœuf, in the embrasure of a window, two young men were talking. One of them saluted Louis with a smile as he passed, and the action drew the Marquis’s attention to him—a youth of twenty or so, tall, slight, and fair, with straight and regular features.
“Who was that?” he asked as soon as they were out of earshot. “He looked more like an Englishman than a Frenchman.”
“It was the Comte Henri de la Rochejaquelein,” replied Louis. “We were in the King’s Constitutional Guard together. The other was his cousin, the Marquis de Lescure. I should have thought you would have known him, for he is almost a neighbour of yours—at least he lives somewhere near Bressuire. La Rochejaquelein is not much further off for the matter of that—but he is an Angevin.”
“I think I have heard the name,” said Gilbert.
“M. de Lescure is like myself,” continued Louis, “under orders from his Majesty not to emigrate. As a matter of fact, he did once get as far as Tournay, but came back.”
“Are they, too, involved in your plot?”
Louis shook his head. “Lescure is too much of a saint to go to Madame d’Espaze’s salon, and has recently married a young wife into the bargain. And as for Henri, I tried to get him to join, but he would not.”
The block in the Rue de Richelieu had apparently proved fatal to the Marquis’s plan of escorting Lucienne to her new quarters. Just outside the Galerie de Diane the cousins met a waiting-woman of the Princess’s, who told Louis in response to his query that Mademoiselle d’Aucourt had left a few minutes ago. Madame Gaumont herself had come to fetch her charge.