"Your Emperor, O people! is fleeing from you by night," soliloquized John Lebrenn as he paced his weary round on the terrace. "He flees the duties to which your voice would call him. He might have enshrined his name in a new glory, that would have been pure and bright forever. But fate drives him on to terrible retribution—captivity, perhaps death. And thus will be avenged the coup d'etat of Brumaire, thus his attempts against the liberty of the people. May the same fate fall upon all the monarchs of the world!"
EPILOGUE.
CHAPTER I.
"TO THE BARRICADES!"—1830.
Fifteen years have rolled their course since the second Restoration, accomplished after the Hundred Days. The Bourbon government seems to have set itself the task of making the indignation of the people run over.
Many are the grievances of France against the Bourbons: Provocations, iniquities, barbarisms, the White Terror of 1815;—the provost courts, where the hatred and rancor of the Emigrants sated itself with vengeance;—assassination, organized, blessed, and glorified, in the south;—Trestaillon and other defenders of altar and throne slaying their fellow citizens with impunity;—the Chamber of Deputies unattainable, all its members royalists save one;—the billion francs' indemnity granted to the Emigrants;—the establishment by the Ultramountainists and the Ultraroyalists of the law of sacrilege and the law of primogeniture;—the impieties of the clergy;—the orgies of the mission fathers.
Military and civil conspiracies sprang up, to protest against the Bourbons with the blood of martyrs. The Carbonarii, a vast secret society, extended its ramifications throughout all France and preserved the traditions of republicanism. The Chamber of Deputies was dissolved, having been guilty of declaring to Charles X through the organ of its majority, in its address to the crown, that harmony no longer existed between the legislative body and the government. The Chamber having been dissolved, the country in the new elections responded by returning 221 deputies of the opposition which composed the majority of the Assembly. King Charles X, in place of deferring to this manifestation by the country, imagined that, thanks to the successes of the French arms in Algeria, he could successfully put through a coup d'etat; which he attempted, using Minister Polignac as his instrument, and rendering the ordinances of the 26th of July, 1830, which suppressed the liberties of the nation.
During the fifteen years of the Restoration, John Lebrenn had continued his Breton cloth trade in Paris. Monsieur Desmarais, having gone mad upon the second return of the Bourbons, died in isolation. Marik, Lebrenn's son, had espoused Henory Kerdren, the daughter of a merchant of Vannes, a correspondent of his father's. One son had been born of the marriage. He was now two years old, and had been given the name of one of the heroes of ancient Gaul, Sacrovir.
The 27th of July, the day after the promulgation of the Polignac decrees, at about eleven in the evening, Madam Lebrenn and her daughter-in-law Henory had closed the shop, and had gone up to their mezzanine floor; there, together in their room, they busied themselves with the preparation of lint, in anticipation of the insurrection which seemed due on the morrow. Marik Lebrenn and Castillon were loading cartridges. Castillon, now at the ripe old age of sixty-three, was white of hair, but still supple and robust, and still plied his ironsmith's trade. A cradle, in which slept little Sacrovir, the grandson of John Lebrenn, was placed beside Henory. It was a picture of the sweet joys of the family.
"In the presence of the passing events, and especially of those that seem to be preparing," observed Madam Lebrenn, the same brave, steadfast Charlotte as of yore, "I feel again that grave and almost solemn emotion which I felt in my girlhood, in the grand days of the Revolution. Those were glorious spectacles!"