The Hero of the People
Copyright© 2024 by Alexandre Dumas
Chapter 28: The First Guillotine.
ON Christmas Eve, a party was given at the Princess Lamballe’s, which the Queen’s presiding over made it really her own reception.
Isidore Charny had returned from Italy that morning and he had found King and Queen very kind to him. Two reasons influenced the latter: one his being the brother of Count Charny, which was a charm in his absence, and his bringing back news from the fugitive princes which suited her wishes.
They backed the Favras scheme and urged her to flee for Turin.
He left her only to go and acquaint Favras with the encouragement. The Queen had said nothing positive about the flight: but he took enough to the conspirator to fill him with joy. For the rest, the cash was in hand, the men notified to stand ready, and the King would only have to nod to have the whole plot set in motion.
The silence of the royal couple was the only thing which worried him. The Queen broke this by sending Isidore, and vague as were the words he repeated, they acquired weight from coming out of a royal mouth.
At nine the young viscount went to Lady Lamballe’s.
Count Provence was uneasy; Count Louis Narbonne walked about with the ease of a man quite at home among princes. Isidore was not known to any of the circle of the princes’ bosom friends, but his well-known name and the partiality accorded him by the princess led to all hands being held out to him.
Besides, he brought news from the foreign refuge where so many had relatives.
When he had delivered his budget, the conversation returned to its former channel; the young men were laughing about a machine for executing criminals which Dr. Guillotin had shown in a full size working model and had proposed to the National Assembly.
When an usher announced the King, and another the Queen, of course all the merriment and chatter ceased.
The more the revolutionary spirit stripped majesty of its eternals the more the true royalists vied with each other to pour evidences of respect upon the august chiefs. 1789 saw great ingratitude, but 1793 great devotion.
To talk over the Favras scheme in secret a whist party was made up of the two rulers, Provence and Charny for the fourth hand. Respect isolated the table.
“Brother,” said the Queen, “Lord Charny, who comes from Turin, says that our kinsfolk there are begging us to join them.”
The King gave a stamp with impatience.
“I entreat you to listen,” whispered Lady Elizabeth, who sat on a stool.
“Listen to what?”
“That Lord Charny has also seen the Marquis Favras since he came home, a gentleman whose lealty we know, and he says that the King has but to say a word,” went on the Queen, “or make a sign, and this very night, you will be at Peronne.”
The King kept still. His brother twisted a jack of hearts all to rags.
“Repeat this as the marquis put it,” said he to Isidore.
“Your Majesty, thanks to measures taken by Marquis Favras, he declares that the King has but the cue to give to be in safety in Peronne this blessed night.”
Turning sharply on his brother, the King said as he fixed his eyes on him:
“Are you coming if I go?”
“I” said the other, turning pale and trembling. “I have not been notified, and I have made no preparations.”
“You know nothing about it, and yet you found the money for Favras?” exclaimed the monarch. “You not notified, and the moves in the game have been reported to you hour by hour?”
“The game?” faltered the prince.
“The plot; for it is one of those plots for which, if discovered, Favras will be tried and doomed to death—unless by money and other means we save him as we did Bezenval.”
“Then you will save Favras.”
“No; for I might not be able to do as much for him. Besides, Bezenval was my liege as Favras is yours. Let each save his own man, and both of us shall have done our duty.”
He rose, but the Queen retained him by the skirt of the coat.
“Sire, whether you accept or refuse, you owe the marquis an answer. What is Viscount Charny to answer for the King?”
“That the King does not allow himself to be spirited away like a slave for the Louisiana plantations.” He disengaged his coat.
“This means,” said Provence, “that the King will not allow of the abduction but if it be executed in spite of his permission, it will be welcome. In politics success condones the crime and blunderers deserve double punishment.”
“Viscount,” said the Queen, “tell the marquis what you heard and let him act as he thinks it points. Go.”
The King had gone over to where the younger men were so hilariously chatting; but the deepest silence fell at his approach.
“Is the King so unhappy that he casts melancholy around him?” he demanded.
“Sire!” muttered the gentlemen.
“You were very merry when the Queen and I came in. It is a bad thing for kings when no one dares laugh before them. I may say the converse: ‘Happy are the kings before whom laughter resounds.’”
“Sire,” returned one, “the subject is not one for a comic opera.”
“Of what were you talking?”
“Sire, I yield the guilty one to your Majesty,” said another, stepping forward.
“Oh, it is you, Editor Suleau,” said the King. “I have read the last number of your journal the Acts of the Apostles. Take care that you do not offend Master Populus.”
“I only said that our Revolution is going so slowly that it has to help on that in Brabant. We are lamenting the dulness of the session of the Assembly where they had to take up the motion of Dr. Guillotin upon—of all things—a new machine for public executions.”
“Are you making fun of Dr. Guillotin—a philanthropist? remember that I am one myself.”
“There are various kinds; the sort I approve of has a representative at the head of the French Nation—the one who abolished torture before trial: we venerate, nay, we love him.”
The hearers bowed with the same impulse.
“But,” proceeded Suleau, “there are others who try to find means to kill the hale while they had a thousand to send the ailing out of this life. I beg your Majesty to let me deal with them?”
“What would you do? decapitate them painlessly, or at least merely give a slight coolness round the neck?” inquired the King, quoting Dr. Guillotin’s recommendation of his invention.
“Sire, I should like all of these inventors to have the first experiment tried on themselves. I do not complain that Marigny was hanged on the Gibbet of Montfaucon which he built. I am not asking, I am not even a judge; the probability is that I shall have to take my revenge on Dr. Guillotin in the columns of my paper. I will give him a whole number and propose that the machine shall bear his name for eternity, the Guillotine!”
“Ha, ha, the Guillotine!” exclaimed the men, without waiting for express permission to laugh.
“I shall assert, also, that life is divided not extinguished by this process,” continued Suleau; “why may not the sufferer feel pain in the head and the trunk after being cut in two?”
“This is a question for medical men. Did none of us here witness the experiment this very morning at Bicetre madhouse?” asked the King.
“No, no, no!” cried many voices.
“Sire, I was there,” said one grave voice.
“Oh; it is you? Dr. Gilbert,” said the sovereign, turning.
“Yes, Sire.”
“And how did the experiment succeed?”
“Perfectly in two instances; but at the third the instrument, though it severed the spine, did not detach the head. They had to finish with a knife.”
The young gentlemen listened with frightened eyes and parted lips.
“Three executions this morning?” exclaimed Charles Lameth, who with his brother had not yet turned against the Queen.
“Yes, gentlemen,” said the King; “but they were three corpses furnished by the hospitals. What is your opinion of the instrument?”
“An improvement on such machines; but the accident at the third experiment proves that it stands in need of improvement still.”
“What is it like?” asked the royal locksmith who had a bias for machines.
Gilbert helped his explanation out by drawing a sketch on a sheet of paper at a table. The King saw how curious the bystanders were and allowed them to come near.
“Who knows,” said Suleau obeying, “but that one of us may make the acquaintance of Lady Guillotine?”
Laughing, they pressed round the board where the King, taking the pen from Dr. Gilbert, said:
“No wonder the experience failed, particularly after awhile. The cutting blade is crescent-shaped whereas it ought to be triangular to sever a resisting substance. See here: shape your knife thus, and I wager that you would cut me off twenty-four heads one after another without the edge turning up.”
He had scarcely finished the words before a heart-rending scream was heard. The Queen had been attracted to the group of which the King and his corrected sketch were the centre. She beheld the same instrument which had been presented her in its likeness in a glass of water by Balsamo the Magician twenty years before!
At the view she had no strength to do more than scream, and life abandoning her as though she were under the blade, she swooned in the arms of Dr. Gilbert.
It is easily understood that this incident broke up the party.
Gilbert attended to the royal patient who was given the bed of the princess. When the crisis was over, which he rightly attributed to a mental cause, he was going out but she bade him stay.
“Therese,” she added to Lady Lamballe, “tell the King that I have come to: and do not let us be interrupted: I must speak with the doctor. Doctor,” she pursued when they were alone, “are you not astonished that chance seems to place us face to face in all the crises moral or physical of my life?”
“As I do not know whether to be sorry or to be glad for it, since I read in your mind that the contact is not through your wish or your will.”
“That is why I said chance. I like to be frank. But the last time we were in contiguity, you showed true devotion and I thank you and shall never forget it.”
He bowed.
“I am also a physiognomist. Do you know that you have said without speaking: ‘That is over; let us change the subject.’”
“At least I felt the desire to be put to the test.”
“Doctor, what do you think of the recent event?” inquired Marie Antoinette as though this was interlinked with what she had spoken.
“Madam, the daughter of Maria Theresa is not one of the women who faint at trifles.”
“Do you believe in forewarnings?”
“Science repels all phenomena tending to upset the prevailing order of things; still, facts offtimes give the lie to science.”
“I ought to have said; do you believe in predictions?”
“I believe that the Supreme Being has benevolently covered the future with an impenetrable veil. Still,” he went on as if making an effort over himself to meet questions which he wished relegated into doubt, “I know a man who sometimes confounds all the arguments of my intelligence by irrefutable facts. I dare not name him before your Majesty.”
“It is your master, the immortal, the all-powerful, the divine Cagliostro, is it not, Dr. Gilbert?”
“Madam, my only master is Nature. Cagliostro is but my saver. Pierced by a bullet in the chest, losing all my blood by a wound which I, a physician, after twenty years study, must pronounce incurable, he cured me in a few days by a salve of which I know not the composition: hence my gratitude to him, I will almost say my admiration.”
“And this man makes predictions which are accomplished?”
“Strange and incredible ones; he moves in the present with a certainty which makes one believe in his knowledge of the future.”
“So that you would believe if he forecast to you?”
“I should at least act as though it might happen.”
“Would you prepare to meet a shameful, terrible and untimely death if he foreshowed it?”
“After having tried to escape it by all manner of means,” rejoined Gilbert, looking steadily at her.
“Escape? No, doctor, no! I see that I am doomed,” said the Queen. “This revolution is a gulf in which will be swallowed up the throne: this people is a lion to devour me.”
“Yet it depends on you to have it couch at your feet like a lamb.”
“Doctor, all is broken between the people and me; I am hated and scorned.”
“Because you do not really know each other. Cease to be a queen and become a mother to them; forget you are daughter of Maria Theresa, our ancient enemy, the sister of Joseph our false friend. Be French, and you will hear the voices rise to bless you, and see arms held out to fondle you.”
“I know all this,” she replied contemptuously; “fawning one day, they tear the next.”
“Because aware of resistance to their will, and hatred opposed to their love.”
“Does this destructive element know whether it loves or hates? it destroys like the wind, the sea and fire, and has womanly caprices.”
“Because you see it from on high, like the man in the lighthouse views the ocean. Did you go down in the depths you would see how steady it is. What more obedient than the vast mass to the movement of the tides. You are Queen over the French, madam, and yet you know not what passes in France. Raise your veil instead of keeping it down, and you will admire instead of dreading.”
“What would I see so very splendid?”
“The New World blooming over the wreck of the Old; the cradle of Free France floating on a sea wider than the Mediterranean—than the ocean. O God protect you, little bark—O God shield you, babe of promise, France!”
Little of an enthusiast as Gilbert was he raised his eyes and hands heavenward.
The Queen eyed him with astonishment for she did not understand.
“Fine words,” she sneered. “I thought you philosophers had run them down to dust.”
“No, great deeds have killed them,” returned Gilbert. “Whither tends old France? to the unity of the country. There are no longer provinces, but all French.”
“What are you driving at? that your united thirty millions of rebels should form a universal federation against their King and Queen?”
“Do not deceive yourself: it is not the people who are rebels but the rulers who have rebelled against them. If you go to one of the feasts which the people hold, you will see that they hail a little child on an altar—emblem of the new birth of liberty. Italy, Spain, Ireland, Poland, all the down-trodden look towards this child and hold out their enchained hands, saying: ‘France, we shall be free because of you.’ Madam, if it be still time, take this child and make yourself its mother.”
“You forget that I am the mother of others, and I ought not do as you suggest—disinherit them in favor of a stranger.”
“If thus it be,” replied Gilbert with profound sorrow, “wrap your children up in your royal robe, in the war-cloak of Maria Theresa, and carry them with you far from France; for you spoke the truth in saying that the people will devour you and your offspring with you. But there is no time to lose—make haste!”
“You will not oppose?”
“I will further you in the departure.”
“Nothing could fall more timely,” said the Queen, “for we have a nobleman ready to act in this escape——”
“Do you mean Marquis Favras?” demanded Gilbert, with apprehension.
“Who breathed you his name—who communicated to you his project?”
“Oh, have a care, for a bloody prediction pursued him also.”
“Of the same Prophet? what fate awaits him?”
“Untimely, terrible and infamous like that you mentioned.”
“Then you speak truly—no time must be lost in giving the lie to this prophet of evil.”
“You were going to tell Favras that you accepted his aid?”
“He was advised and I am awaiting his reply.”
She had not long to wait, for Isidore Charny was ushered in by the Princess Lamballe.
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