Mated from the Morgue Part 15

When they descended, the captain escorted them to the adjoining church.

'Here,' he said, 'he rests, the mortal part of him; here he was carried to his tomb by the heirs of the dynasty he helped to overthrow. You see, my children, he sleeps in the midst of the ancient braves at whose head he once marched to victory; there, on the bronze tripod, is the sword he wore at Austerlitz; look above, where those dusty trophies droop, ah!

sixty of them--this poor arm helped to win some few--they are flags taken from the enemy in fair fight. They are--torn, bullet-pierced, and time-mouldered as they are--the emblems of a glory that will live while lives the world!'

The O'Hoolohan was getting excited. His brow flushed and his eyes flashed. He tapped one foot on the marble floor like a restive charger awaiting the trumpet-call to advance. He scanned the aisles and niches of the sacred building as if he were searching for some lurking foe; he clenched his right hand on an imaginary sword-hilt as if on the point of rushing into some shock of battle. With all his calmness in actual combat, such as we saw him at Clamart, this man was capable of being roused to a flood-tide of pa.s.sion, when his heart and imagination were touched.

'Glory, grandfather,' urged Berthe; 'is it not very dearly bought, sometimes? Suppose we kneel and pray that France may have a crop of glory that is not so dreadful in the offering or so sad in the fruit for the future.'

'You are right, my child,' acceded the captain, for this time it was not the old soldier, but the old man who spoke, and they all knelt and prayed, though it would be unsafe to pretend that they prayed with equal fervour, or that the object of their pet.i.tions was the same.

The next stage in the pilgrimage was the Quai Conti, opposite the statue of Henry IV., on the Pont Neuf. Here, on the fifth story of the house, No. 5, a young officer of artillery, lately commissioned from the school of Brienne, lived in 1785. A struggling painter poked the fire in the garret, haunted by the shadow of the ambitious Bonaparte, the awkwardly built, dwarfish stripling, with high cheek-bones, sallow complexion and deep-sunken orbs, who came to the window at nights and gazed palace-wards and sky-wards so long and earnestly, his hands clasped behind his back, and then broke into a hurried, jerking, sentry-walk to and fro in his circ.u.mscribed chamber.

To the Hotel de Metz in the Rue du Mail next, where Bonaparte lodged, at No. 14 on the third story, in 1792. At that period he dined at a restaurant in the Rue des Pet.i.ts-Peres. The dishes there were cheap.

They cost but six sous each. Cheap as they were, he had once to make a forced march with his watch upon the nearest p.a.w.n-office before he could raise means to stay the calls of appet.i.te.

At the corner of the Rue du Mail and the Rue Montmartre is, or was, the Hotel of the Rights of Man. By the time Bonaparte had got thus far, he had made comparatively good progress on the ladder of fortune. He had four windows in a row now in his apartment, and three chambers, two of which were shared with his brothers Louis and Junot.

Three years later, Bonaparte, now a general of artillery, resided in No.

19, Rue de la Michodiere, in a small furnished room. He was going up, but he was no wastrel. Not till later on did he choose to change his dwelling to the Hotel Mirabeau, in the Alley of the Dauphin, near the Tuileries. An episode of his career is laid in this hotel, which the dramatists should seize and turn to their purposes. It might have influenced the fate of nations. Had it come to its natural issue, the maps might be drawn otherwise to-day. Fanchette, the daughter of Pere Thouset, the landlord, took a liking to the young general of the Republic. She was not ill-favoured; and he might make a steady husband.

The general tried his arms in a field other than his, and, with his usual luck, he made a conquest. Father-in-law, who was rich, consented to a marriage, on two conditions: the first, that Bonaparte should quit the army; the second, that he should become an hotel-keeper! But an accident befell Fanchette which put Cupid's nose out of joint, much to the benefit of his brother Mars.

The time came when Napoleon mounted to the topmost rung, lived in castles and palaces, was guest and host of kings; but our friends were satisfied--indeed, were more pleased with visiting his humble habitations--the cell of the student, the airy garrets of the adventurous soldier. The struggles of greatness to the light awaken emotions more touching than all the magnificence of a.s.sured success.

They trended by the Rue St. Honore to the church of St. Roch. There it was the tide turned--there the hero had his first chance. It was the twelfth Vendemiaire of the year IV., that is to say, the 22nd October, 1795. Thirty-three sections of the population rose in discontent at a decree reserving to the Convention two-thirds of the places in the Council of the Five Hundred. They were thirty thousand strong, and marched on the Tuileries. The Convention had but twelve thousand men to oppose them, and gave the command to Barras, who called in Bonaparte.

The captain, obscure till then, notwithstanding his services at Toulon, put forty-two pieces of cannon round the palace, and mowed down the insurgents. Their headquarters was the church of St. Roch. Bonaparte, with correct, remorseless aim, pointed two guns with his own hand on the crowd collected on the steps of the edifice and fired. The sections were defeated; the corner-stone was laid of the reputation that was to mount so high.

'I vote we wind up by paying a visit to the column in the Place Vendome,' said the O'Hoolohan, who was an admirer of Napoleon, but who was getting hungry and who began to think he had enough of hero-worship for his marriage-day.

'No, my son,' said Captain Chauvin, 'I always make it a point of hanging a wreath of immortelles on the rails at the base of the column on the 5th of May, the anniversary of his death; but I never like to go there but that one day of the twelve months. No, we shall first try a visit to the Louvre--it is not yet closed--and I love to show, to those who can value relics of the kind, the statue of the one man I reverenced, when he was in the beauty of his manhood.'

They went and saw the statue. It represents Napoleon as he might have been at the epoch of Lodi, before he had trained his features to the impa.s.siveness of stone, before he had waxed dumpish, and wore a stiff curl on his broad, bald forehead. An idealized Napoleon this, impetuous energy in his gaze, expression, att.i.tude; mastery in the eagle eyes; vigour in the gaunt limbs; resolution in the big lean jaws; dogged obstinacy in the close-shut lips and close-cut chin. What an irresistible forcefulness in the balance of the eager pose! what a cloudy-and-lightning poetry in the long wild hair sweeping like a mane over his shoulders!

Thus should heroes be eternized in bra.s.s, or granite, or marble, while they are instinct with the glory of action, not when they are aged and fatten and grow bilious and use ear-trumpets. They should be given to posterity in their prime, when they did the great things for which posterity will remember them. Great is the anointed of Notre Dame; but greater is the victor of Lodi!

This O'Hara said, first warming with the a.s.sociations of the Napoleon room of the Louvre, and then kindled into enthusiasm by the applause of Captain Chauvin, whose heart was so young for all his white beard and deep wrinkles; and Caroline looked at the speaker approvingly, and he looked back, and suddenly it was revealed to him that she was strikingly handsome.

That night when he retired to rest in his hotel in the Latin Quarter, the tress of hair he had long kept warm at his breast was missing.

Was this an omen?

CHAPTER XIV.

VANITAS VANITATUM.

There is a certain poet whose free-and-easy philosophy expressed in verse, rippling and silvery, but slightly too luscious for Sunday reading in a boarding-school conducted on correct principles, holds that when far from the lips we love, we have but to make love to the lips we are near. Our friend O'Hara, we fear, was much addicted to reading that erotic bard, and had been so long removed by time and so far by distance from his mistress, to whom belonged the tress of hair he wore over his heart and under his watch-fob--fob without a watch--that he had not many obstacles to conquer in persuading himself that Captain Chauvin's unmarried _protegee_ was strikingly handsome. There was that high-bred air about her, too, which plays such havoc with the feelings of a race accustomed to set more store by blood than pelf. Her manners were stamped by a refined self-respecting reserve not chilled to the point of _hauteur_. She had a commanding figure, with brilliant eyes, and that feature which is the greatest charm in woman--an even and undamaged set of almond-white teeth, when her lips parted. Her hair, besides, was the colour of his tress--as ebon and full, as thick and glossy.

'Frenchwomen make good housewives,' reflected Ma.n.u.s to himself, as he smoked the pipe of meditation the morning after the marriage. 'They're not very expansive at home, it is true, but they do adore their children. Caroline is not insipid, anyhow. In case anything happened to Bidelia, she would be just the woman to fall back upon. Besides, I have neither leisure nor liking for billing and cooing. How is Bidelia, by the way? What is she doing? Egad! I'll write to London, to my cousin Hyacinth, to ask him.'

And he did write.

And this was the answer he got eight-and-forty hours afterwards:

'Doughty Street, London, W.C.

'April 27th, 1866.

'DEAR Ma.n.u.s,

'Confound you, why don't you write oftener? As we used to say on the old sod (by-the-way, is Ireland really older than any other place?)--as we used to say, I repeat, only twisting the phrase--it's good for sore eyes to see your crabbed fist. How am I getting on? _More Hibernico_, I shall answer, your question by asking one of my own. How are _you_ getting on? You haven't taken your degree yet, with or without honours, that I can plainly discern, _ma bouchal_. Taking lessons in anatomy from the living subject at Bullier, I'm afraid, eh? you born divil of the O'Hara breed and the pedigree without a blemish. Now, if you were a suckling barrister you might have a chance of getting at the head of your profession by phrenologically investigating the Chief Justice's noddle; but studying the symmetry of the human form divine from the contortions of Rigolboche and her friends is hardly the way to rival Butcher or Brunton.

'Chaffing apart, old man, I do hope you stick to your profession, and are not carried away by your ill-starred pa.s.sion for Literature. Like Art, she is but a sorry, wanton jade to pay court to, and leaves you in the lurch when most you stand in need of a helping hand. Better be a mediocre sawbones than a mediocre paper-stainer. The mediocre sawbones can always take a shop, go to India, marry a sickly widow, or invent a patent medicine. As for poor paper-stainer, every day that he lives he is eating his way into his capital. My boy, they won't lend money to a pressman in this town, even on solvent security. The other day I went myself _in propria persona_ to ask for a small advance from an advertising firm of usurers close to London Bridge, and after I had filled and signed a pile of scored fools-cap, what did they tell me?--"If you had informed us that your were a journalist at first you might have saved yourself all that trouble. We make it a rule to have no business transactions with journalists!" There was a pewter inkstand at my elbow, and I imagine it would have had a business transaction with a greasy little Hebrew's countenance if I didn't happen to catch a glimpse of a couple of others, who were hiding behind the tall desks, cut-and-dry witnesses in the event of a.s.sault and battery, I presume. Here I must stop to drink a gla.s.s to the memory of t.i.tus. Wasn't he the fellow that brought about the destruction of Jerusalem? Glory be his bed and birthright this blessed day!

'Well, 'tis time to tell you how I am getting on. _Imprimis_, I have _not_ set the Thames ablaze, and, honestly, I must admit that it was not for the lack of inflammable properties in the liquid.

One may be a Triton in his own parish pond, and a very minute minnow in this huge ocean of London. The streets are not paved with gold, nor the houses roofed with rubies. The streets are more usually paved like those of another spot, but with big ambitions instead of good intentions, and as to the houses, he's a lucky dog who has one he can call his own. I have tried my hand at anything and everything not requiring a strict preliminary training--bar stone-breaking. I had aspirations towards the stage, but I never got beyond the front door--that is to say, I was hired as a check-taker at the Vaudeville once. I thought I would write a melodrama--an Irish one, of course--and I took it to one Mrs.

Selby, a dear old lady, who had a house devoted to comedietta and extravaganza, legs and upholstery--how innocent of all these things I was, you may guess from this--and she kindly recommended me to cart it to the Surrey. I did. It was accepted on conditions, after sundry hums and haws. The theatre was burnt down two nights afterwards. The theatre was insured, but, alas! the ma.n.u.script of "The Terryalts" was not, and I hadn't a copy of it.

I next became a cab-driver; that is, as soon as I got to have the map of the town sunk in _bas-relief_ on my cranium. A hard life, precarious, hara.s.sing, and not very profitable. The novelty of the thing kept me up for a while, but I had to give in after a course of three months. The deuce of an adventure I had but once, and that was with a distinguished member of the craft I at present honour with my patronage. It was outside Stone's, in Panton Street. A portly man, with a nose the hue of a danger-signal, hailed me.

"Barnes, cabby," he said, "and look alive about it." "All right, sir," and away I rattled till I got to Barnes, a village on the south bank of the river, between Putney and Mortlake. I opened the spy-hole at the top of the hansom to ask at what house I was to stop, and, lo and behold you! there was my fare snoring the snore of the just. I got down and roused him. "Where are we?" he asked. I told him. "Drat you!" he cried, "I meant Barnes' Tavern, in the Haymarket--I wanted to borrow some tin there." I apologized. "All right, watchman," he cried, "drive on!" and dropped back again into the corner as sound asleep as a curled hedgehog. I drove to the middle of Barnes Common, tenderly lifted my customer out of the cab, and gently bedded him on his back in the shadow of a furze-bush.

'My next essay at fortune took a military turn. I went down to Charles Street, Westminster, met a recruiting sergeant, declared my enthusiastic yearning to join the sappers and miners, and soiled my palm with the Saxon shilling. My martial career was not remarkably lengthened. I failed to "pa.s.s the doctor" next morning--he told me I had varicose veins! Bad manners to his impudence, the pursy little humbug! I only wished you and I had him alongside us up Keeper Hill, on one of our boyhood's rambles, and we'd soon take the wind and the conceit out of him.

'What was I to do now? I was fairly at my wits' end. To rob I was not able--it requires genius here; to beg I was ashamed. I had serious thoughts of trying my hand at the fine arts. I heard that those fellows who chalk mackerel on the pavement make a tidy living out of it, and it struck me that a new departure in that direction might bring me fame and fortune. My notion--it may turn up a trump yet for somebody--was to paint caricatures in distemper on the backs of tortoises. But I had no spare cash to lay out on stock, either in pigments or specimens of the genus _testudo_.

'At last I met Providence in the form of Dan McCarthy, of Doonas.

"Hyacinth," said he, "do you know anything of boxing?" I was puzzled, for I wasn't sure but he meant boxing the compa.s.s, but I found I had got into the wrong box there. The long and short of it was, a friend of his had asked him to look up a smart man with a ready pen and a vigorous imagination, who would undertake to write racy accounts of some of the renowned fisticuff fights of old, for a publican's newspaper. That's what I am doing now, G.o.d forgive me!

The pay is good, but the work does not like me, I am wise in the "upper-cut," and am known to every "sc.r.a.pper" in the "drums" of the East and West End, and all the rest; in short, I am comparatively comfortable, but completely demoralized. When you come over next, I can take you, perhaps, to a "merry little mill," for I am always in the "know."

'Don't come, though, an you're sensible, in such weather as we have now. Fog! fog!! fog!!! How I envy you the clear skies of the one city in the world outside Ireland worth living in--wicked, delightful Paris. D----n the London fog! It caught me by the larynx and laid me by the heels three days last November. It steals on you like a garrotter, throttles you, chokes your lungs, clogs your fancy, clouds your good-humour, and sets your drunken landlady stealing your coal by the scuttle and your gin by the quartern.

'Your affectionate coz,

'HYACINTH BLAKE.

'P.S.--And so it is after Bidelia Blake you'd be asking, Mr.

Slyboots? Faith! she has changed her name. Bidelia, or "Biddy," as we knew her, transmogrified herself into Beatrice when she came over here. Not satisfied with that, she has altered her surname to Clarke. A fine, handsome, wealthy, warm-hearted husband he is, and no fool. He's a deal better than Biddy deserved. They have a mansion in Mayfair, and I have the run of the house, but I seldom go there, as I do not wish to make myself too cheap. I met them in the Park yesterday. Dash my b.u.t.tons! as Li-Chung, the Chinaman, says, if you'd recognise Biddy. She was rosy with health and spirits (Nature's, not Kinahan's), and burning with jewels. I don't know if her husband chains her up at night, but she had a something like a bra.s.s dog-collar round her neck. And her wool--I believe you got a tress of it once--is not black now, but yellow--the effect, I am seriously afraid, not so much of London sunshine or London fog, as of golden hairwash. You had better ask her for another tress.

'H. B.'

O'Hara's face, as he perused this letter, would have served as a model for an actor charged with the duty of reading a similar epistle on the stage. He liked his cousin, but he did not seek to conceal his impatience--n.o.body else was present--at Blake's recital of his meanderings in quest of a social position. The letter was humorous here and there, but he did not appreciate the humour. He wanted to hear of Bidelia; and when he did hear of her, in the abrupt way Hyacinth put it in his postscript,--well, his face was a study. He coloured, he re-read the pa.s.sage, he clutched the paper tightly in his palm, he laughed, he sat down in his arm-chair, he read the postscript for the third time, and then he lit his pipe.

It is an excellent plan to light one's pipe in moments of vexation.

O'Hara _was_ vexed, more vexed than sorry. He puffed and thought, and thought and puffed, and knit his brows, and occasionally took the amber mouthpiece from between his lips and grinned in a scornful fashion, like the baffled villain of tragedy in a show-booth. He stood up at length, took the paper in which the tress of hair was confined, did not kiss it as his wont was, but flung it into the stove, where it lit up, as if it were well preserved in pomatum, crackled crisply, flared, and left a sharp ugly smell of singed goose behind it. O'Hara thought there was a peculiar repulsiveness in the odour. It was the result of his frame of mind. The perfumed locks of Cleopatra would have smelled as foul. The laws of nature are not affected by our prejudices. The body of the hero putrefies by the same process as the body of Hodge.