The Sword of Honor Part 74

"It has indeed been many years since we met, monsieur; for, if you recollect, I accompanied my brother to the cabal in St. Roche Street.

What a time! What sad days!"

"Indeed; and your Eminence must recall how lacking in respect to you the reverend Father Morlet was, who arrogated to himself the chairmanship of our meeting. The reverend was accompanied by his G.o.d-son, who seemed to be about the age of this pretty page" (indicating Gonthram); "but he was far from resembling him, for I never saw a face more sly and hypocritical than that child of the Church wore."

"Father Morlet is dead, and his G.o.d-son, taking orders in Rome under the name of Abbot Rodin, is affiliated with the Society of Jesus," the Cardinal informed the group. "This Father Rodin, as private secretary of the present General of the Order, enjoys great influence. Ah! by my faith! I did not know that our master hypocrite was in Paris!"

While the Cardinal was uttering these last words, the door opened and in stepped himself, the reverend Father Rodin. He was accompanied by an usher, into whose ear he dropped a couple of words. Rodin was now past his thirtieth year. His meager face, smooth shaven and wan, his half-closed and restless reptile eyes, his slightly bowed back, his already bald forehead, his bent neck, his sidling gait, his att.i.tude of mock-humility, through which shone his contempt for others--everything about the man stamped him as hypocrisy incarnate. His black gown was threadbare and whitened at the seams; the mud was caked on his clumsy shoes. In one hand he held a squalid-looking cap, in the other an old cotton umbrella with red-and-white checks.

The usher to whom he spoke stepped for a moment into the next room and returned almost immediately. He made a deep obeisance of respect to the Jesuit, and said to him in a voice marked with great deference, "Reverend Father, I have the honor to conduct you at once to the private cabinet of monseigneur, who is at present engaged with the Duke of Otranto."

Rodin made a sign of a.s.sent, and with eyes fixed on his shoes, so that he did not see the Cardinal, he was about to walk by the group in which the latter stood.

"Usher!" called the Cardinal, haughtily, "a word with you. We, Monsieur the Count of Plouernel and I, were here before this reverend, which he does not seem to know. The reverend gentleman should wait his time of audience, and not usurp ours," he added, while Rodin bowed himself almost to the ground before him.

"I have the honor to inform your Eminence that I have orders from Monseigneur the Duke of Blacas on the subject of this holy Father. He is to be introduced whenever he presents himself, and before all other persons. I obey the orders given me," returned the usher.

"I shall not allow a simple priest to precede by a single step a Prince of the Church!" stamped the Cardinal. Rodin only bowed before him several times, lower than before, without raising his eyes to his face.

"My orders are imperative," said the usher.

Indignant the Cardinal turned to his brother. "Well, brother," he said, "there we are! By the navel of the Pope, I'd like to knock the interloper down!"

For all answer Rodin again mutely and humbly inclined towards the Cardinal. Then he made a sign to the usher to precede him, and vanished through a door on the opposite side of the room from where he had entered.

The latter entrance again swung open, and admitted Lieutenant General Count Oliver, in the garish uniform of his rank and decorated with the Legion of Honor and several foreign orders. He wore the great red ribbon on his scarf, the order of the Iron Crown over his shoulder, and the Cross of St. Louis in one of the b.u.t.tonholes of his coat, which glittered with braid. John Lebrenn's old apprentice was now thirty-eight; his moustache still held its blackness, but his hair was streaked with grey; his face still was handsome and martial. A total stranger to the other personages in the audience chamber, he seated himself a little distance off from the group formed by the Cardinal, the Count of Plouernel, and Monsieur Hubert. Count Desmarais had withdrawn into the alcove of a window.

"That Jesuit, that scamp, that priestlet, introduced to Monsieur Blacas before me!" stormed the Cardinal to the Count, his brother. "Me, a Prince of the Church! I declare, as things are going, helped along by that execrable charter of 1814, we are marching towards another '93!

France is lost!"

"The Restoration has done a great deal for the clergy, Monsieur Cardinal," declared Hubert. "You are very wrong to cast reproaches at the King and the government."

"I am of my brother's opinion as to what concerns the n.o.bility," said the Count of Plouernel. "I blame the King strongly for giving the command of two regiments of his guards to ex-Marshals of the Empire, clodhoppers, men of no account, like all these plebeians, hardly sc.r.a.ped clean by the n.o.bility Napoleon covered them with." General Oliver, so far unnoticed by the Count of Plouernel, here moved indignantly, but the Count proceeded: "The King should never have entrusted commands to these barrack-heroes, smelling of the pipe and the bottle, b.u.mpkins whom we must elbow out of our way at the Tuileries, we, old Emigrants, who fought them under the Republic. We sacrificed all for our masters, and they do us the outrage to treat these upstarts as our equals! These specimens, during their Emperor's time, expressed themselves most insultingly toward the house of Bourbon; and to-day they accept services, favors, and commands from the King. It is only to betray him some day; at least that would not be the last word in the renegades'

baseness, and they would not even be conscious of their apostasy!"

At this General Oliver rose, pale with anger, and striding roughly up to Plouernel said in a voice of concentrated rage:

"Sir, you will regret, I am convinced, your last words, when you learn that I, Lieutenant General, Count Oliver, have served the Emperor, to whom I owe my rank and t.i.tle. For I have the honor to be a soldier of fortune, sir. I shall know how to chastise any insolence that may be addressed to me!"

Disdainfully looking General Oliver over from head to foot, the Count of Plouernel made answer: "Well, sir! I, Gaston, Count of Plouernel, second in command in his Majesty's Black Musketeers, have the honor never to have served any but my masters. I followed them into exile, and I returned to France in 1814. You have my opinion of traitors and turn-coats."

"The King has conferred on me the command of a military division, and it pleased him to award me the Cross of St. Louis. Tell me, sir, am I in your eyes because of that command and that decoration a traitor or a renegade? Answer, sir," demanded Oliver.

"Since you ask me, sir, I shall reply in all sincerity----"

At the moment when Plouernel would have finished the sentence, he was interrupted by the hilarious roar of a new personage who had burst into the room laughing fit to split his sides. It was his old friend the Marquis of St. Esteve, that intolerable would-be conspirator, whom the most serious moment could not check in his buffoonery. Powdered white, the Marquis's hair was dressed in 'pigeon-wings'; his little queue bobbed up and down on the collar of his bourgeois' coat with gold epaulets. He wore a court sword, knee breeches, and top boots; he was the epitome of that type of Emigrant dubbed 'Louis XV's tumblers.' On seeing Plouernel he at once ran toward him, clasped him in his arms, and all the while laughing fit to kill, exclaimed:

"Ah, Count! Hold me! I die! Oh, the idea! Ha, ha, ha! This time I shall split of it, surely! Oh, oh, oh! If you knew the funny sto--ry! Ah, the idea! I shall surely choke--let me laugh!"

Plouernel pushed him off, muttering "Devil take the nuisance!"

"Hang the Emigrant!" growled Oliver, on his part. "Interrupting just as I was about to slap that insolent fellow's face!"

"You don't know of it!" ran on the Marquis, continuing to shriek with laughter. "Ha, ha, ha! Bonaparte--has--has--oh! the idea!--has returned--has landed at the gulf--oh! oh!--at the gulf of Juan, near the town of Antibes! If that wouldn't make one split his sides laughing! Hi, hi, hi!"

"Gentlemen," cried an usher rushing in in a fright, and beside himself, "his Excellency has just been summoned to the King in haste by an important unforeseen matter. There is no need waiting--the audiences are off for another day!"

Following him hurriedly out of Blacas's cabinet, came Fouche, rubbing his hands. Glimpsing Desmarais, pale and distracted at the news of Napoleon's landing, he called to him: "If the tyrant does not have you shot on his return, Citizen Count Brutus, my faith, you will have fortune with you this time. Make your will!"

"Such a catastrophe! The designs of G.o.d are indeed impenetrable!"

exclaimed the Cardinal to Fouche.

"On the contrary, this is the happiest event that could happen under the canopy. You don't see that Bonaparte falls into the little trap I set for him. His return is folly. He will reach Paris without striking a blow, for the Bourbons are execrated. But before a month, all Europe will march against France."

Without waiting for Fouche to finish his speech, the various persons in the hall fled to the door, each a prey to a different fear.

CHAPTER IX.

WATERLOO.

The Hundred Days were over. They had pa.s.sed like the lightning in a stormy night. Relying only on his genius and his army, Napoleon had staked upon the turn of a battle his Empire and the independence of the country. This battle, of Waterloo, he lost, in spite of the super-human heroism of his soldiers.

May the name of Napoleon be accursed!

Several days had pa.s.sed since that great disaster. In the cloth shop of John Lebrenn, in St. Denis Street, under the sign of the 'Sword of Brennus,' the following scene was enacting.

General Oliver, back wounded from the battle of Waterloo, where he had bravely conducted himself, was engaged in conversation with his former master.

"Well, Oliver," Lebrenn was saying to the wounded warrior, "your Bonaparte has led France to her doom. We have lost the frontiers conquered by the Republic. A second time the stranger is in the heart of our country."

"Ah, would that I had remained at Waterloo, like so many others of my companions-in-arms. But death would not take me!"

"I reproach you not, Oliver. You are defeated and unhappy; you have returned to us. Let us draw the curtain over the past."

"How just were the forebodings of your valiant sister! I sought a t.i.tle of n.o.bility, chivalric orders, and an income. To sustain the Empire I would have shot my parents and friends. When the Restoration took place, I did like the most of the Marshals and generals. In order to preserve my rank, my t.i.tle, my crosses and my pay, I turned traitor to my past, I served the Bourbons, whom I despised. I would still have retained a fair competency even if, which was almost impossible, I had been able to tear myself away from the attraction of the army. But no, I had become a servile courtier. I had breathed the air of the court, I could live nowhere else. I cried 'Long live the King!' I went to ma.s.s, I followed the processions, a wax taper in my hand, I swallowed the insults the Emigrants heaped upon us when they beheld us at court crooking the knee to their princes. Ah, Victoria! Victoria! Shame and anguish have fallen upon me. I betrayed the Republic in Brumaire, I sold myself to the Restoration in 1814, I deserted it during the Hundred Days, and here I am reduced to exile--a just punishment for my apostasies."

"You have at least, Oliver, the conscience to repent that sad past. But you will see how few among the generals and Marshals of the Empire will repent like you the acts whose memory now galls you. Yes, you will yet see the Princes, the Dukes, and the Counts of the Empire, little as the new Restoration will please them, take up again the white c.o.c.kade as quickly as they threw it down three months ago for the tricolor. Most of the Marshals are gorged with wealth; dignity would be easy for them.

But no, they must renounce it for vanities dearer to their pride. Just G.o.d! There you have the fruits of Napoleon's maxim 'It is by rattles that men are led.'"

"I see too late the abysses toward which Napoleon was driving France,"

groaned Oliver.

Martin the painter just then happened in. "Ah, my dear friend," he announced from the threshold, "all hope is lost. Carnot despairs of the situation."

"Nevertheless, the situation is still good," protested Oliver. "Paris, considered as an immense entrenched camp, gives us the disposition of the five bridges across the Seine. It would be possible, by a night march, to move our troops by either bank of the river and wipe out the Prussian army. But, to carry out that plan, the people would have to be armed, which Napoleon does not want. The people in arms would mean revolution and the Republic."