“The accursed old dame,” growled my father angrily; “tell her they are not ripe, do you hear, neither have they ripened for many a long year.”
The next time I saw Riquelle I gave her this message, and she dropped the subject.
Many years later, the day after the Proclamation of the Revolution of 1848, coming to the village to inquire the latest news, the first person I saw was Dame Riquelle standing there in her doorway, all alert and animated, with a great topaz ring blazing on her finger.
“Hé, but the tomatoes have ripened this year,” she cried out to me. “They are going to plant the ‘trees of liberty,’[5] and we shall all eat of those good apples of Paradise.... Oh, Sainte-Marianne, I never thought to live to see it again! Frédéric, my boy, become a Republican.”
I remarked on the fine ring she wore.
“Ha, yes, it is a fine ring,” she rejoined. “Fancy—I have not worn it since the day Bonaparte quitted this country for the island of Elba! A friend gave me this ring in the days—ah, what days those were—when we all danced the ‘Carmagnole.’”
So saying she raised her skirt, and, making a step or two of the old dance, entered her cottage chuckling softly at the recollection of those bygone days.
But when I recounted the incident to my father his recollections were of a graver kind.
“I also saw the Republic,” he said, “and it is to be hoped the atrocious things which took place then will never be repeated. They killed the King Louis XVI., and the beautiful Queen, his wife, besides princesses, priests, and numberless good people of all sorts. Then foreign kings combined and made war upon France. In order to defend the Republic, there was a general conscription. All were called out, the lame, the blind, the halt—not a man but had to enlist. I remember how we met a regiment of Allobrogians on their way to Toulon. One of them seized my young brother, and placing his naked sword across the boy’s neck—he was but twelve years old—commanded him to cry out ‘Long live the Republic,’ or he would finish him off. The boy did as he was told, but the fright killed him. The nobles and the good priests, all were suspected, and those who could emigrate did so, in order to escape the guillotine. The Abbé Riousset, disguised as a shepherd, made his way to Piedmont with the flocks of Monsieur de Lubières. We managed to save Monsieur Victorin Cartier, whose lands we farmed. For three months we hid him in a cave we dug out under the wine-casks, and whenever the municipal officers or the police of the district came down upon us to count the lambs we had in the fold, and the loaves of bread in the pans, in accordance with the law, my poor mother would hasten to fry a big omelette at the stove.
“When once they had eaten and drunk their fill, they would forget, or pretend to do so, to take further perquisites, and off they would go, carrying great branches of laurel with which to greet the victorious armies of the Republic. The châteaux were pillaged, the very dove-cotes demolished, the bells melted down, and the crosses broken. In the churches they piled up great mounds of earth on which they planted pine-trees, oaks and junipers. The church at Maillane was turned into a club, and if you refused to go to their meetings you were at once denounced and notified as ‘suspect.’ Our priest, who happened unfortunately to be a coward and a traitor, announced one day from the pulpit that all he had hitherto preached was a lie. He roused such indignation that, had not every man lived in fear of his neighbour, they would have stoned him. It was this same priest who another time wound up his discourse with the injunction that any one who knew of or aided in hiding a ‘suspect,’ would be held guilty of mortal sin unless he denounced such a one at once to the Commune. Finally, they ended by abolishing all observance of Sundays and feast-days, and instead, every tenth day, in great pomp they adored the Goddess of Reason—and would you know who was the goddess at Maillane? Why, none other than the old dame Riquelle!”