The duke found his faculty of taste more to be relied upon in the open air; and took his stand accordingly in the portal, where he stood negociating and gossiping for an unconscionable time, till first one or two people appeared in the court, then more, and more still, and in an instant the well-known drum was heard close by, and the shouts of a rabble which poured in without the slightest warning. Orleans looked as if he was going to be very angry; but Charles had no time to parley with his hypocrisy.
It was too late to fasten the portal on the outside, and run to the house. Pierre’s motion was to pull the duke with them into the cellar; but his master forbade. He thrust Orleans out of the portal, calling out,
“See, we carry a light in with us; and remember you tread on hollow ground,”—and retreated, not allowing even his faithful Pierre to enter the place of danger with him. He locked, bolted, barred and double barred the door, went and placed the lantern close by the train, looked to his matches and tinder, and then sat down, with folded arms, to await the issue of the expected siege. He was fully resolved to sacrifice his life and property rather than be aiding and abetting with Orleans in giving a licentious character to the great act (whatever it might be) which the people were evidently contemplating. The more he had thought of the events of the preceding day, when arms had been seized and cannon laid hold of by the people, the more convinced he had been that the present would not pass away without being signalized by some extraordinary deed, and the more resolutely determined he felt to use such power as he had, for the safety and honour of the state. The fierce yells of the mob outside had no effect but to increase his courage, as they served to justify his object to himself; and as he looked through the dim vault, from the further end of which came the dull echo of the blows upon the door, as he observed that the one feeble light did not so much as flicker in the socket while all was tumult outside, he felt a thrilling consciousness of power which was not gloomy, though it was fearful, and might involve his own destruction. Whether it would involve any other life, he had considered much and long; he believed not; or that if one or a few should be injured by the slight explosion which would effect his purpose, this would be a less evil than would be perpetrated by a drunken mob in possession of such means of destruction as they had seized the day before.
One circumstance nearly unnerved him. He had prevented Pierre from entering with him, under the idea of saving his life from the peril in which his own was placed; but the sudden outcry which presently arose, the oaths evidently directed at an individual, the cries of shrill female voices,—“To the lamp-post with him!”—agonized Charles with the idea that the vengeance of the mob for his opposition was to fall upon his unfortunate servant. He felt a momentary impulse to throw open the door and take all the consequences, the first of which would undoubtedly be that he would be taken to the lamp-post,——
“Not instead of Pierre, but with him,” he thought, however, in another moment. “No. I cannot save him; so I will persevere. And may heaven hold me guiltless of his blood; for I meant well towards him!—But what now?—What a silence!—Have they sent for fire to smoke me out? I will throw up a thicker smoke presently, if that be it.—O, what a horrible cry! What can have put them in a new rage?”
If Charles could have looked through the thick walls of his vault, he would have seen that which might well have called down an immediate sentence of death on all his household; that which added new horrors to his wife’s suspense, and increased the agony of poor Pierre, standing as he was in the grasp of two of the enemy, and assured by the fish-women about him that he was to be hanged as soon as they could find a cord. He forgot his own situation for a moment when he looked up to the balcony, and saw the deplorable mistake which was likely to prove the destruction of the whole family. Nobody within doors had thought of M. Raucourt, whom no event was now ever known to bring from his easy chair at the front window. He was left alone while the back of the house was being barricaded with all speed, and messengers put out upon the roof to find their way, if possible, to the authorities; or at least to make signals for assistance. But the children came in a state of amazement to grandpapa, and the shouts reached even his dull ear, and recalled the associations which in the old royalist were always the first to be awakened. He had no other idea than that the people were hailing the royal family, and he resolved not to be behind others in his duty. He sent Pauline for the white cockade he had given her, tottered to his chamber, got out, under a new impulse of strength, upon the balcony, and waved his white favour. It was this which had silenced the mob with astonishment; and in the depth of this silence, the feeble, cracked voice of the old man was heard trying to shout “Vive le Roi!”
The horrible burst of passion which followed was not directed against him. The helplessness of his attitude as he stood supporting himself with both hands, and the gleam of foolish pleasure which came over his countenance, showed his real state; and even the lowest of the mob did not yet make war against dotards. It was because his act was supposed to betoken the politics of the family that it excited such an outcry; and there seemed some reason for Pierre’s fears that the very house would be presently levelled with the ground. It made his heart sick within him to see the old man smiling and bowing, and trying to induce the shrinking children to come and stand beside him, and resisting his wretched daughter’s attempts to withdraw him. Pierre struggled fiercely, but in vain; he implored, more humbly than he would have stooped to do for his own life, to be allowed two minutes’ speech to the people. He met only threats and laughter. The threats mattered little to a man who expected to be hanged in a few minutes, but the laughter stung him to the soul. He cursed himself for the folly of having appealed to those who could mock the innocence of dotage and childhood, and disregard the agony of a woman: and he recalled the words in which he had at first spoken to them as the French people.
Pierre was right. These were no sample of the French people who had begun to cast off the yoke of tyranny. These were a portion of the brutalized class who, in using the word tyranny, thought only of the difference between suffering and inflicting it: who, when they talked of liberty, asked for license to plunder palaces and riot in wine-cellars. These were, in short, the Orleans mob, and not the real authors of the political changes now taking place. They aided these changes at the time, indeed, by testifying to the degree of oppression which the lower orders had till now suffered; and they furnish, to this day and for ever, an instructive commentary upon these changes, in as far as they exhibit the operation of despotism in preparing its own downfall by at once brutalizing and exasperating its victims. But still these were perfectly distinct from the true protectors of liberty, the wise and steady opponents of despotism. These last were very differently employed this morning, and tidings of their doings came just in time to preserve Charles and his family.
The children had already been sent away by the roof, in charge of the servants, and Marguerite had sat down alone beside the chair of her father, (whom it was impossible to remove, and whom she would not leave,) when sounds reached her which gave her back a little of the hope she had wholly surrendered. It was not the approach of soldiers, nor the potential voices of magistrates, nor any of the welcome intimations of help at hand which conclude a riot and disperse a rabble in an orderly country, and under ordinary circumstances. Neither soldiers nor magistrates could be depended upon, or had any power in Paris at this time but that which the outrageous mob chose to allow them. Marguerite knew this so well, that, though she took all precautions in sending for aid, she expected none but that which might arise from accident. Such a diversion of the people’s rage as actually happened was beyond her hopes.
While her father was still talking about the king, and she was holding him down in his chair, in opposition to his complaints of not being allowed to go to the window to pay his duty, the fearful sound of the tocsin was heard above all the uproar in the court and street. One cry seemed to come on the four winds,—“To the Bastille! to the Bastille!” At first confused and reiterated, the clangor and the shout echoed noisily from street to street, from steeple to steeple. Presently the cry became more concentrated, as if the city sent up but one mighty voice. Marguerite sank down on her knees, overcome with the hope of deliverance for her husband; but the mob did not yet cease to batter the door which shielded him, and the fierce women cried out that they would not be decoyed away by a false alarm. After a few more moments came the booming of cannon on the ear, and a pause followed in the court. Again it came, and again, and the windows rattled, and there was in the intervals quiet enough for the rushing of a steady stream of people to be heard from the streets, from whom arose, in alternation with silence, the deep and steady cry, “To the Bastille!” The mob in the court mixed with this stream, eager to learn what new scene was to be enacted, what better hope of plunder was presented than that afforded by the stores of an obstinate and insignificant wine-merchant, who had already caused them more trouble than he and his goods were worth. They looked round for a signal from their leader, but Orleans had disappeared some time before, not choosing to be held responsible for the violence to which he had tempted his followers. They went to look for him at the Bastille, where he was indeed present, to help, as usual, to disgrace a work set on foot by better men.