Chapter 6: The Revolution in the Country.

OUR intention being to temporarily abandon the fortunes of our high and mighty characters to follow those of more humble but perhaps no less engaging heroes, we take up with Sebastian Gilbert whom his father, immediately after his release from the Bastile, confided to a young peasant named Ange Pitou, foster-brother of the youth, and despatched them to the latter’s birthplace, Villers Cotterets.

It was eighteen leagues from the city, and Gilbert might have sent them down by stage-coach or his own carriage; but he feared isolation for the son of the mesmerists’ victim, and nothing so isolates a traveler as a closed carriage.

Ange Pitou had accepted the trust with pride at the choice of the King’s honorary physician. He travelled tranquilly, passing through villages trembling with the thrill from the shock of the events at Paris as it was the commencement of August when the pair left town.

Besides Pitou had kept a helmet and a sabre picked up on the battlefield where he had shown himself more brave than he had expected. One does not help in the taking of a Bastile without preserving some heroic touch in his bearing subsequently.

Moreover he had become something of an orator; he had studied the Classics and he had heard the many speeches of the period, scattered out of the City Hall, in the mobs, during lulls in the street fights.

Furnished with these powerful forces, added to by a pair of ponderous fists, plenty of broad grins, and a most interesting appetite for loiters-on who did not have to pay the bill, Pitou journeyed most pleasantly. For those inquisitive in political matters, he told the news, inventing what he had not heard, Paris having a knack that way which he had picked up.

As Sebastian ate little and spoke hardly at all, everybody admired Pitou’s vigorous paternal care.

They went through Haramont, the little village where the mother of one and the nurse of the other had died and was laid in earth.

Her living home, sold by Pitou’s Aunt Angelique, her sister-in-law, had been razed by the new owner, and a black cat snarled at the young men from the wall built round the garden.

But nothing was changed at the burying-ground; the grass had so grown that the chances were that the young peasant could not find his mother’s grave. Luckily he knew it by a slip of weeping willow, which he had planted; while the grass was growing it had grown also and had become in a few years a tolerable tree.

Ange walked directly to it, and the pair said their prayers under the lithe branches which Pitou took in his arms as they were his mother’s tresses.

Nobody noticed them as all the country folk were in the field and none seeing Pitou would have recognized him in his dragoon’s helmet and with the sword and belt.

At five in the afternoon they reached their destination.

While Pitou had been away from Haramont three years, it was only as many weeks since he quitted Villers Cotterets, so that it was simple enough that he should be recognized at the latter place.

The two visitors were reported to have gone to the back door of Father Fortier’s academy for young gentlemen where Pitou had been educated with Sebastian, and where the latter was to resume his studies.