"Tush!" snarled Oswald, "the fellow is a mere Frenchman—a heartless fool, who would laugh in the face of a corpse, as old Inveraw of Ours used to say."
Let us change the scene to a period of thirty-one years after.
It is now the year 1789.
M. le Comte de Montmorin, a venerable peer, was then the secretary of state for the foreign department under Louis XVI. Madame la Comtesse, after being long the mirror of Parisian fashion, had become a staid and noble matron, with a son in the French Guards, and two marriageable daughters, the belles of Paris. The old minister, their grandsire, had long since been gathered to his fathers, and was sleeping far away, among the long grass and the mossy headstones of his old grey kirk on bonny Tweedside. Another occupied his humble manse, another preacher his pulpit, and other faces filled the old oak pews around it.
The horrors of the French Revolution were bursting over Paris!
The absolute power of the crown of the Louis; the overweening privileges of a proud nobility and of a dissipated clergy, with their total exemption from all public burdens, and the triple tyranny under which the people groaned, had made all Frenchmen mad. A determined and fierce contest among the different orders of society ensued; the mobs rose in arms, and the troops joined them. A new constitution was demanded, and equality of ranks formed its basis; for the cry was,
"Vive the people! down with the rich, the noble, and the aristocrats!"
The flower of the French nobles either perished on the scaffold or fled for safety and for foreign aid; the King himself became a fugitive, but was arrested on the frontiers and brought back to Paris. The streets of that city swam in blood, and the son of Lucy Fleming, a brave young chevalier, perished at the head of his company in defending the beautiful Marie Antoinette, and his head was made a foot-ball by the rabble along the Rue St. Jacques. A thousand times Lucy urged her husband to fly, for Paris had become a mere human shambles, but the determined old soldier of Ticonderoga and Quebec stood by his miserable king, and coolly proceeded each day to the foreign office on foot; for the mobs systematically murdered every aristocrat who dared to appear in a carriage, sacrificing even the valets and horses to their mad resentment.
In July, a vast armed multitude assailed the Bastille, and foremost among the assailants was a Scottish gentleman—known by many as the notorious Sylvester Otway; by others as Jack Oswald of the Black Watch.
After quitting the regiment, this remarkable man (whose father was the keeper of John's coffee-house at Edinburgh) had made himself perfect master of the Greek, Latin, and Arabic languages; and he became a vegetarian, in imitation of the Brahmins, some of whose opinions he had imbibed during service in India. He became a violent political pamphleteer, and on the outbreak of the French Revolution repaired at once to Paris, where his furious writings procured him immediate admission into the Jacobin club, in all the transactions of which he took a leading part, and was appointed to the command of a regiment of infantry, which was raised from the refuse, the savage and infamous population of the purlieus of Paris; and they marched sans breeches, shoes, and often sans shirts, with their hair loose, and their arms, faces, and breasts smeared with red paint, blood, and gunpowder.