The ex-retainer nicknamed “Forget-Not” bore a baleful grudge because of the cruelties inflicted on his own father many years before by the Countess’s father––the cruel punishment of pouring boiling lead into the unfortunate tenant’s veins: a procedure on which the boy Chevalier had been taught to look approvingly.
In fact ever since the elder Jean Setain displeased the then Seigneur of the de Vaudrey estate, the affairs of the tenant family had gone to wrack and ruin until the middle-aged son was little more than a landless beggar and an embodied voice calling for vengeance.
The original parties of the quarrel were dead. But the feud (on the part of Jacques-Forget-Not) had taken on a more personal aspect, because his own sufferings were involved as well as the memory of his father’s. He had determined to kill the Chevalier, the Countess and the Count.
In normal times the monomaniac’s designs 101 would never have reached fruition. Now the vast public discontents converted the cringing ex-tenant or shrieking beggar into a gaunt, long-haired, ferocious agitator––one of the outstanding crazy figures of Great Crises!
For the Storm––long brewing in seditious Palais Royal or seething faubourg, in the heart and conscience of patriot Dantons, the cunning of Robespierres, the wildness of Desmoulins fire-eaters, the starvation and misery of the people––struck the doomed country with full force.
In the outcome the fat King Louis XVI, the hapless royal family, and the whole supporting system of parasitic aristocracy, were hurled down into black nothingness! The upset released our characters from the horrors of prison immurement, only to plunge them in the more awful tyranny of the New Terror.
Early in midsummer the wildest rumors reached Paris that the Versailles government intended to put down the discontents by weight of sword. Armies were advancing on the city, ’twas averred––cannon and arms were being parked in the commanding 102 squares; the King’s faithful Allemands and Swiss were about to attack the representatives of the people and mow them down.
As a beehive, stirred by over-curious bear or by an invader’s stick, seethes and swarms in milling fury before the myriads of angry occupants attack and overwhelm the intruder with their stings, so the seething populace mills in widening and ever widening circles, out to destroy––burn––slay. The ominous drum murmurs to the people of their ancient wrongs. Artisans pick up their nearest implements, the butcher his axe, the baker his rolling pin, the joiner his saw, the iron worker his mallet or crowbar, rushing to join the homicidal throngs. Vengeful leaders like Forget-Not urge them on, directing the milling masses to the central places of the city.
At the Palais Royal gardens, later from the Cafe de Foy, Camille Desmoulins is in his glory. See him rushing out, sibylline in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He springs to a table: the police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him; not they alive, him alive.