Read Ebook: Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude by Wassermann Jakob

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Ebook has 1478 lines and 58010 words, and 30 pages

ADVENTURES OF THE COMTE DE LA MUETTE.

Casimir Bertrand I had known and been friendly with at Le Plessis. Later he had imbibed theories; had become successively a Lameth, a Feuillant, a Jacobin--a constitutionalist, a moderate, an extremist; had spouted in the Faubourgs and overflowed in sectional Committee rooms; had finally been elected to represent a corner of the States-General. I had known him for a pious prig, a coxcomb, a reckless bon-vivant. He was always sincere and never consistent; and now at last, in the crisis of his engaging sans-cullotism, he had persuaded me, a proscribed royalist, to take an advantage of his friendship by lodging with him. Then it was that the driving-force behind his character was revealed to me. It was militant hedonism. Like Mirabeau, he was a strange compound of energy and voluptuousness. He turned altogether on the nerves of excitement. He was like a clock lacking its pendulum, and he would crowd a dozen rounds of the dial into the space of a single hour. Such souls, racing ahead of their judgment, illustrate well the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise; and necessarily they run themselves down prematurely. Casimir was an epicure, with a palate that could joyfully accommodate itself to black bread and garlic; a sensualist, with the power to fly at a word from a hot-bed of pleasure to a dusty desert of debate. Undoubtedly in him , and in a certain Cr?pin, with whom I came subsequently to lodge, and who was of the type only a step lower in the art of self-indulgence, I had an opportunity to see reflected a very serious canker in the national constitution.

Now he opened his eyes as I gazed on him, and shut them again immediately. It was not his habit to be a slug-a-bed, and I recognised that his sleep was feigned. The days of his political influence were each pregnant of astonishing possibilities to him, and he was too finished an epicure to indulge himself with more than the recuperative measure of slumber--frothed, perhaps, with a bead of aesthetic enjoyment in the long minute of waking.

"Casimir!" I called softly; but he pretended not to hear me.

"What, my friend! the sun is shining, and the eggs of the old serpent of pleasure will be hatching in every kennel."

He opened his eyes at that, fixed and unwinking; but he made no attempt to rise.

"Let them crack the shells and wriggle out," he said. "I have a fancy they will be a poisonous brood, and that La Bourbe is pleasantly remote from their centres of incubation."

"Timorous! I would not lose a thrill in this orgy of liberty."

"Jean-Louis, I saw the Sieur Julien carried to the scaffold last night. He went foaming and raving of a plot in the prisons to release the aristocrats in their thousands upon us. There is an adder to reproduce itself throughout the city! Truly, as you say, the kennels will swarm with it."

"And many will be bitten? My friend, my friend, there is some dark knowledge in that astute head of yours. And shall I cower at home when my kind are in peril?"

"My faith! we all cower in bed."

"But I am going out."

"Be advised!" "Be advised and lie close in your form--like a hare, Jean-Louis--like a hare that hears the distant beaters crying on the dogs. Twitch no whisker and prick not an ear. Take solace of your covert and lie close and scratch yourself, and thank God you have a nail for every flea-bite."

"What ails thee of this day then, morose?"

"What ails this Paris? Why, the Prussians are in Verdun, and the aristocrats must be forestalled."

"But how, Deputy."

"I do not know. I fear, that is all."

"Well, there lies your sash--the talisman to such puerile emotions."

"Return to bed, Jean-Louis. It is unwise to venture abroad in a thunderstorm."

"It is unwiser to shelter beneath a tree."

"But not a roof-tree. Oh, thou fool! didst thou not close thine eyes last night on a city fermenting like a pan of dough?"

"'Et cette alarme universelle Est l'ouvrage d'un moucheron.'"

"But go your way!" he cried, and scrambled out of bed.

He walked to the little washstand with an embarrassed air, and set to preparing our morning cup of chocolate from the mill that stood thereon.

"After all," he said, when the fragrant froth sputtered about his nostrils, "the proper period to any exquisite sensation is death. I dread no termination but that put to an hour of abstinence. To die with the wine in one's throat and the dagger in one's back--what could kings wish for better?"

He handed me my cup, and sipped enjoyingly at his own.

"I am representative of a constituency," he said, "yet a better judge of wine than of men. The palate and the heart are associated in a common bond. That I would decree the basis of the new religion. 'Tears of Christ'!--it is a vintage I would make Tallien and Manuel and Billaud de Varennes drunk on every day."

He laughed in an agitated manner, and glanced at me over the rim of his cup.

"Go your way, Jean-Louis," he repeated; "and pardon me if I call it the right mule one. But you will walk it, for I know you. And eat your fill of the sweet thistle-flowers before the thorns shall stab your gullet and take all relish from the feast."

I paused, stared at his twitching face, took up my hat quietly, and left the room.

Not just yet, perhaps; and in the meantime the king empties his private purse to buy wood for the freezing people. This will warm them into loyalty while it lasts; and they crawl out of their icy burrows, or gather up their broken limbs on the snow beds--whereinto they have been ground by the sleds and chariots of the wealthy that rush without warning down the muffled streets--to build monuments of snow to the glory of their rulers. Then by-and-by these great obelisks melt, and add their quota to the thaw that is overwhelming what the frost has spared.

The red socks! Now, on this wild Sunday of September, when the monuments that bore the names of the good king and queen are collapsed and run away some eight years, the tocsin is pealing with a clamour of triumph from the steeples; for at last the solution of the riddle has been vouchsafed to the "Third State," and it knows that to acquire the right point of view it must wear socks, not of its own blood but of that of the aristocrats, to whom the emblems of No?l were made to appeal.

All day I felt the pulse of the people, quickening, quickening--an added five beats to every hour--with wonder, rage, and, at last, terror maniacal. Paris was threatened; hard-wrung freedom was tottering to its fall.

This Paris was a vessel of wrath on treacherous waters--manned by revolted slaves; the crew under hatches; encompassed by enemies on every side. What remained but to clear the decks for action,--every hero to his post at the vast bulwarks; every son-of-a-sea-cook to remain and poniard the prisoners lest they club their manacles and take their captors in the rear!

At two o'clock the tocsin pealed--the signal to prepare for the fray. From its first blaring stroke I ceased, it seemed, to be myself. I waived my individuality, and became as much a conscript of the rising tide of passion as a high-perched stone that the wave at last reaches and drags down with the shingle becomes a condition of the general uproar. I made, indeed, no subscription to this fanatical heat of emotion; I was simply involved in it--to go with it, and perish of it, perhaps, but never to succumb to its disordered sophistries or yield my free soul to its influence. Possibly I had a wild idea, in the midst of sinister forebodings, that a few such as I, scattered here and there, might leaven the ugly mass. But I do not know. Hemmed in by wrath and terror, thought casts its buoys and sinks into very fathomless depths.

From the Place de Gr?ve, along Pelletier Quay; across the Ponts au Change and St Michel; westwards by the Rue St Andr? des Arcs, where a little diversion was caused by a street-singer at whom the crowd took offence, in that he, being an insignificant buffoon, did pelt it with its classic pretentiousness, wagging his coat-tails in contempt thereof ; round, with a curve to the south, into the Rue de Bussi; thence, again westwards, along the street of St Marguerite; finally, weathering the sinister cape of the Abbaye St Germain, northwards into the Rue St Benoit and up to the yard entrance of the very prison itself,--such was the long course by which I was borne, in the midst of clamour, hate, and revilings, some dreadful early scenes in the panorama of the Revolution unfolded before my eyes--scenes crudely limned by crude street artists, splashed and boltered with crimson, horrible for the ghastly applause they evoked.

Then began the "severe justice of the people."

"You have hard wrongs to avenge!" I shrieked; "but at least the form of pleading has been granted you!"

"And these!" cried the killers. "Blood of God! is not Bastille Maillard within there checking the tally of the accursed? Aristocrat art thou!"

I do not know whither my wanderings tended, or what space of time was covered by them. Sooner or later I was always back at the Abbaye, glutting my soul with assurance of its own wreck, helpless, despite my loathing of it, to resist the attraction. What horror absorbs the moth as it circles round the flame, I thought in those recurrent moments I could understand.

Once, when I returned, an unwonted silence reigned about the place. A few vampire figures, restless, phantasmal, flitted hither and thither in the neighbourhood of the reeking shambles. But the slaughterers and the red ladies of St Michel were retired, during an interval in the examination, for refreshment. I heard the shrill buzz of their voices all down the Rue St Benoit and from the wine and lemonade shops opposite the very gates by which I stood.

I looked into the fearful yard. My God! the dead, it seemed, were phosphorescent with the rottenness of an ancient system! Here, there, on all sides they broke the darkness with blots of light like hideous glow-worms--their hundred white faces the reflectors of as many lamps.

"But it is a brave illumination!" gurgled a voice at my ear.

I glanced aside in loathing. A little old woman, whose lungs barked at every breath, stood near me. She laughed as if she would shake herself into touchwood.

"She placed these lamps?"

"She led her sisters to the committee that sits there." "She complained that ladies who would fain enjoy the show were prevented by the darkness. Then to each dead aristocrat they put a lamp. That was a fine courtesy. It is not often one sees such goods brought to market."

A wild cloud of shapes came rushing upon us with brandished weapons and a demon skirl of voices. I thought at first that I must be the object of their fury; but they passed us by, cursing and gesticulating, and drove something amongst them up the yard, and stopped and made a ring about it on the bloody stones. What was it? I had a glimpse of two petrified faces as the little mob swept by, and a queer constriction seized my heart. Then, all in a moment, I was following, crying in my soul that here was something tangible for my abased humanity to lay hold of--some excuse to indulge a passion of self-sacrifice--some claim to a lump of ice at my feet and a lamp at my head. The dead were so calm, the living so besotted. A miserly theft, I thought, to take another's blood when one's own gluts one's arteries to suffocation.

A half-dozen harpies held the girl. There was a stain of red on her ripe young lip, for I think one of the beasts had struck her; but her face was stubborn with pride. In front of all the old wizened man, who had been released, ran to and fro in an agony of obsequious terror.

"Yes, yes," he quavered, "'tis a luminous sight--an admirable show! They lie like the fallen sticks of rockets, glimmering a dying spark. Is it not so, Carinne? Little cabbage, is it not so?"

He implored her with his feverish eyes.

"They are martyrs!" cried the girl; "and you are a coward!"

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