Adventures of the Comte de la Muette during the Reign of Terror

One morning I awoke in La Bourbe and looked across at Deputy Bertrand as he lay sprawled over his truckle-bed, his black hair like a girl’s scattered on the pillow, his eyelids glued to his flushed cheeks, his face, all blossoming with dissipation, set into the expression of one who is sure of nothing but of his own present surrender to nothingness. Beside him were his clothes, flung upon a chair, the tri-colour sash, emblematic stole of his confused ritual, embracing all; and on a nail in the wall over his head was his preposterous hat, the little carte de civisme stuck in its band.

Casimir Bertrand (one time Casimir Bertrand de Pompignan) I had known and been friendly with at Le Plessis. Later he had imbibed theories; had become successively a Lameth, a Feuillant, a Jacobin--a constitutionalist, a moderate, an extremist; had spouted in the Faubourgs and overflowed in sectional Committee rooms; had finally been elected to represent a corner of the States-General. I had known him for a pious prig, a coxcomb, a reckless bon-vivant. He was always sincere and never consistent; and now at last, in the crisis of his engaging sans-cullotism, he had persuaded me, a proscribed royalist, to take an advantage of his friendship by lodging with him. Then it was that the driving-force behind his character was revealed to me. It was militant hedonism. Like Mirabeau, he was a strange compound of energy and voluptuousness. He turned altogether on the nerves of excitement. He was like a clock lacking its pendulum, and he would crowd a dozen rounds of the dial into the space of a single hour. Such souls, racing ahead of their judgment, illustrate well the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise; and necessarily they run themselves down prematurely. Casimir was an epicure, with a palate that could joyfully accommodate itself to black bread and garlic; a sensualist, with the power to fly at a word from a hot-bed of pleasure to a dusty desert of debate. Undoubtedly in him (did I make him the mirror to my conscience), and in a certain Crépin, with whom I came subsequently to lodge, and who was of the type only a step lower in the art of self-indulgence, I had an opportunity to see reflected a very serious canker in the national constitution.

Now he opened his eyes as I gazed on him, and shut them again immediately. It was not his habit to be a slug-a-bed, and I recognised that his sleep was feigned. The days of his political influence were each pregnant of astonishing possibilities to him, and he was too finished an epicure to indulge himself with more than the recuperative measure of slumber--frothed, perhaps, with a bead of æsthetic enjoyment in the long minute of waking.

“Casimir!” I called softly; but he pretended not to hear me.

“What, my friend! the sun is shining, and the eggs of the old serpent of pleasure will be hatching in every kennel.”

He opened his eyes at that, fixed and unwinking; but he made no attempt to rise.

“Let them crack the shells and wriggle out,” he said. “I have a fancy they will be a poisonous brood, and that La Bourbe is pleasantly remote from their centres of incubation.”

“Timorous! I would not lose a thrill in this orgy of liberty.”

“But if you lost----?” he checked himself, pursed his lips, and nodded his head on the pillow.

“Jean-Louis, I saw the Sieur Julien carried to the scaffold last night. He went foaming and raving of a plot in the prisons to release the aristocrats in their thousands upon us. There is an adder to reproduce itself throughout the city! Truly, as you say, the kennels will swarm with it.”

“And many will be bitten? My friend, my friend, there is some dark knowledge in that astute head of yours. And shall I cower at home when my kind are in peril?”

“My faith! we all cower in bed.”

“But I am going out.”

“Be advised!” (He struggled quickly up on his elbow. His face bore a clammy look in the sunlight.) “Be advised and lie close in your form--like a hare, Jean-Louis--like a hare that hears the distant beaters crying on the dogs. Twitch no whisker and prick not an ear. Take solace of your covert and lie close and scratch yourself, and thank God you have a nail for every flea-bite.”

“What ails thee of this day then, morose?”

“What ails this Paris? Why, the Prussians are in Verdun, and the aristocrats must be forestalled.”

“But how, Deputy.”

“I do not know. I fear, that is all.”

“Well, there lies your sash--the talisman to such puerile emotions.”

“Return to bed, Jean-Louis. It is unwise to venture abroad in a thunderstorm.”

“It is unwiser to shelter beneath a tree.”

“But not a roof-tree. Oh, thou fool! didst thou not close thine eyes last night on a city fermenting like a pan of dough?”

“‘Et cette alarme universelle Est l’ouvrage d’un moucheron.’”

“But go your way!” he cried, and scrambled out of bed.

He walked to the little washstand with an embarrassed air, and set to preparing our morning cup of chocolate from the mill that stood thereon.

“After all,” he said, when the fragrant froth sputtered about his nostrils, “the proper period to any exquisite sensation is death. I dread no termination but that put to an hour of abstinence. To die with the wine in one’s throat and the dagger in one’s back--what could kings wish for better?”

He handed me my cup, and sipped enjoyingly at his own.

“I am representative of a constituency,” he said, “yet a better judge of wine than of men. The palate and the heart are associated in a common bond. That I would decree the basis of the new religion. ‘Tears of Christ’!--it is a vintage I would make Tallien and Manuel and Billaud de Varennes drunk on every day.”

He laughed in an agitated manner, and glanced at me over the rim of his cup.

“Go your way, Jean-Louis,” he repeated; “and pardon me if I call it the right mule one. But you will walk it, for I know you. And eat your fill of the sweet thistle-flowers before the thorns shall stab your gullet and take all relish from the feast.”

“Casimir!” I cried in some black wonder--“this is all the language of a villain or an hysteric----!”

I paused, stared at his twitching face, took up my hat quietly, and left the room.