Now made me rich and honour’d; then her frowns
Dash’d all my joys, and blasted all my hopes.”
The Huntingdon Divertisement,
played at Merchant Tailors’, 1678.
ACT I.
“Balthazar,” said a fine-looking lad in the prison of Orléans, “you are a brute!”
By way of reply to this testimonial to character, the gaoler struck the boy with his heavy bunch of keys on the head. The blow sent young Edmond staggering against the wall. He recovered himself, however, and dauntlessly repeated—
“Balthazar, you are nothing better than a brute!”
And Edmond Thierry was right. Balthazar was not only a brutal gaoler, but he took delight in his vocation. He had abandoned the honest calling of a “marbrier,” to take upon him the duties of guarding the victims whom Republican suspicion had consigned to captivity, and whom it destined to death. There is no doubt but that Balthazar was a brute.
But brute as he was, his prisoners despised him. They endured, but they defied him. His hand might smite, but his ferocity could not subdue them. They would be happy, and their determination only rendered him the more ferocious. From the old Briton gentleman, Pantin de la Guerre, to little Edmond Thierry, there was not one whom he would not daily cuff, and cuff all the harder from the conviction that they dared not, for their lives, strike again an officer of the Republic, one and indivisible.
Balthazar then was incontestably a brute; and young Thierry had just told him so, for the third time, when the youthful Madame de Charry opened the door of her cell and entered the gallery. The latter was secured at either end by an iron grating, which was always locked; but the cells themselves, twelve in number, with three or four occupants in each, were barred and fastened only at night. The “citizens” inhabiting them were untried aristocrats; and until the law condemned them to death, they were allowed the liberty of an obscure gallery, from which they could not by any means escape to freedom.