“You dogs!” says the Marquis smoothly; “I would ride over any of you very willingly and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew who it was that threw that coin I would have the brigand crushed under the wheels.”
So cowed were they, so long and hard had been their experience of what such a man could do to them, that not a voice or a hand or an eye was raised.
Such was the condition of the French before the great Revolution of 1789; and while the picture is drawn by a novelist, it is the picture of a novelist who painted human life and human conditions as they were never painted before. His pictures were photographs.
In another book, not a novel but a history, (the title and the author of which shall not be mentioned here), there is another description of human relations under the Ancien Régime, and that description claims to be literally true. I quote the author’s own words:
“Was it not in this same year, 1788, that the Duke of Béthune’s carriage, dashing through the narrow streets, as was the aristocratic custom, ran over a little girl in the rue de la Ferronnerie and killed her?
“Did not the mother see it all? Did not she rush wildly to the scene, snatch up the poor crushed form, gaze distractedly into the eyes for light and see none, lay her cheek to that of the child to feel the warmth of life and feel none?
“Still was the little heart, gone the breath, blanched the cheeks, frozen the tiny hands.
“What sound does the ear ever hear like that of the voice that was heard of old in Ramah?
“Shriek after shriek split the air, piercing every heart in the crowd that gathered as the frantic mother, holding her dead child in her arms, gave voice to her grief.
“And the Duke, what said he? ‘Let the woman come to my house, and she shall be paid for her loss.’