“Is it your own choice to be out to-night, sir; or are you occupying a post? Because, in the first case I would direct you where you might see more of the state of things than here; and, in the other, I would strongly recommend your appealing to the general for support.”
“Alas! yes. I am sent hither,” replied the quavering voice of the muffled up person. “None would willingly be abroad this night, and all my desire is to be left unobserved in this shadow at present;—unless, indeed, some friend should pass who might protect me, and from whom I might learn that which I am sent to ascertain.—You seem, sir, to be an orderly, honest man. Can you tell me whether the duke,—whether Orleans is at hand?”
“Orleans being the most honest and orderly of men, hey, marquis?” said Charles, laughing. “So you are sent out by lady Alice for tidings, and you wait here for them till Orleans passes by—Is it not so?”
“Ah! what can I do? These canaille will smother me again with flour, or drag me to the cold cannon;” and here the little man shivered, and his teeth chattered. “Do but bring me to Orleans, my good sir, or get me a re-entrance into the palace, and I will——I will——This morning air is so raw! and I am——I am——not fit for enterprise.”
Charles fully agreed with him; but having no interest to get a royal spy housed before his errand was done, he could only tell him that, to the best of his belief, Orleans was lingering about the road between Versailles and Paris, or hanging somewhere on the outskirts of the encampment to witness the issue, without being implicated.
“Ah! how he is happy in comparison with me!” cried the poor marquis. “I have never, sir, meddled with politics——”
“Further than as all the noblesse have operated,” interrupted Charles. “I mean in stimulating the people to meddle with politics. You have wrought at second hand, marquis, hitherto. Now is your time for taking your part finally, and acting in it.”
“Alas! what evils come of any one interfering in such affairs but ministers and deputies! Let them act, and let us be neutral. This is all I ask.”
“Aye, but, marquis, it is too late to ask this; because there has been great mistake about what is, and what is not, being neutral. I dare say you believed yourself neutral when you lay sleeping in bed, while your peasantry were keeping the frogs quiet in your ponds. I dare say you had no thought of politics in your boar hunts, or when three fathers of families were sent to the galleys for alarming the lady Alice’s brooding doves. Yet you were all the while——”
The marquis’s light blue eyes were now seen by the lamp light to be opened upon Charles with such an expression of vacant wonderment that it was plain there was no use in proceeding. He evidently had yet to learn the true province of politics; and, for his part, he thought the merchant must have drunk a little too deep in his own wine, to be talking of peasants and pigeons in connexion with an insurrection in Paris.—He would never have had courage to leave his nook by himself; but now that he had met a face that he knew, it required more courage to remain there by himself, and he therefore hooked Charles by the arm, and said he would be wholly guided by him. Charles would rather have dispensed with his attachment, but could not shake off the old man into darkness and helplessness, if he himself preferred venturing into the light of the watch-fires, and upon the threshold of Lafayette’s lodging, whither he was warned he would be conveyed.