MARIE ANTOINETTE'S TALISMAN. 455
sharing the same lessons, caressed by the same
motherly hand, he could not, all at once, yield
up the traditions of a superior race to which,
by implication and habit, he almost belonged.
It was in vain that he took upon himself the
habits of the people, that he lived in a garret,
and gave up the income of a little property
which he had inherited from his own parents, to swell the extravagance of his foster-brother. A neglected toilet, unwashed hands, and coarse
clothing, were insufficient to brutalize this man
into one of the monsters that a little while after
this baptized themselves patriots.
Notwithstanding his moderation, and his wish to save the monarchy, and give freedom to the people at the same time, Monsieur Jaque went hand-in-hand with Madame Gosner, and threw himself into this fearful work with equal energy He, too, believed that a wicked deception had been practiced upon a long-suffering woman, and could find no way of accounting for it which did not implicate the King and Queen of France. Some times, when he thought of the honest, kind face of Louis the Sixteenth, of the simplicity of his words, the shy gentleness of his manner, this belief became almost an impossibility to him. Nor could he think of the queen, so earnest, so generous and beautiful, without recoiling in his heart and reason from the thought that she could have known and sanctioned an act so full of dishonor, or so bitterly unkind.
But the fact still remained, no matter where the blame lay. A terrible wrong had been done, a human life worse than sacrificed. More than this, ont of that awful place one soul had made its cries of agony heard; but how many others lay in those vaults, unknown. Those awful walls, with their seven feet in thickness, were built thus massively, that the cries of human anguish might never penetrate them. What became of the hundreds on hundreds that had crossed that draw-bridge, never to be heard of again? Had they been carried out in the silence of midnight to unknown graves, or were they still chained to those reeking walls, and crouching in cells so far beneath the earth that they possessed all the horrors of a grave, without its peacefulness?
The fire spread. Mirabeau heard the story from his foster-brother, and thundered it through the clubs. It burned like a romance on his lips, and glowed out in words of fire on the pages of his journal. In less than three days all Paris was in a storm of indignation, and poured itself tumultuously into the streets, If human ingenuity could have imagined anything more terrible than the horrors of that man’s fate, the passions of an ignorant people would have invented something more awful than the truth; but here the bitterest passion failed, and the simple fact was far more powerful than exaggeration ever could have been.
Monsieur Jaque told the story, and in his own stirring language described the scenes he had himself witnessed in the Bastile, Madame Gos- ner pleaded with a woman's pathos and a man's power for the husband who had been torn from her in his youth, and was now perishing in the cells of that hideous prison. All the terrible traditions of the Bastile were nothing to the actual story of this man, as it came from the lips of his wife. Through the work-shops, the markets, the quays, and the clubs, the fact of his incarceration, after a pardon had been granted, and his death proclaimed, spread like fire along a train of powder.
The reckless demagogues, who had been so long striving to fire the people with a spirit of revolt, saw in all this an element of revolution stronger than their eloquence, and seized upon it with sharp energy. The clubs arose at once, uniting in one grand effort; but it was in answer to a clamorous demand from the people, who, ready for revolt, called aloud for guides and leaders.
The time had come. One night the streets of Paris were darkened by crowds of silent, stern men, whose enger faces looked sinister in the lamplight, as they turned invariably toward the Place de Grove. The men moved swiftly on in comparative silence; but wherever they paused a warehouse was broken open, and everything of iron or steel it contained taken therefrom, though all other articles were scrupulously left untouched.
Women, too, came out from their domicils, and swelled the stream that poured into the Place de Grove. Each carried some burden—a loaf of bread, a bar of rusty iron, or a ponderous fire-shovel, from her own hearth-stone. Before midnight the Place de Grove, and the adjoining streets broke into a blaze. Anvils and forges in full blast seemed to start out of the very earth, lighting up all the grim outlines of the Hotel de Ville, and the great crowds of men and women that swarmed around it, with gleams of light thrown against deep, deep shadows, that made the whole scene terrible. To this was added the sharp ring of iron against the steel, the roll of wheels bringing in heavy loads of plunder, the crash of hammers thundering to each other, and the awful hum and swell of angry voices in suppression.
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