Part 40 (1/2)
”Well, boy, go back and take off those clothes,” said he, sternly; ”resume your trade or occupation, whatever it be, and leave politics and state affairs to those who can understand them. Tell your father--”
”I have none, sir.”
”Your mother, then, or your friends, I care not what they be. What letter is that you are crumpling in your fingers?” broke he in, suddenly.
”To General Danitan, sir.”
”Give it me,” said he, half s.n.a.t.c.hing it from me.
He tore it hastily open and read it, occasionally looking from the paper to myself, as he went on. He then leaned over the table where the secretary sat, and, showed him the letter. They conversed eagerly for some seconds together, and then the general said,--
”Your friends have recommended you for a post in the 'chancellerie militaire': is that your liking, lad?”
”I should be proud to think myself capable of doing anything for my own support,” was my answer.
”D'Artans, see to him; let him be enrolled as a supernumerary, and lodged with the others.--This gentleman will instruct you in your duty,”
added he to me, while, with a slight nod towards the door, he motioned me to withdraw.
I retired at once to the antechamber, where I sat down to think over my future prospects, and canva.s.s in my mind my strange situation.
Troops of officers in full and half dress, orderlies with despatches, aides-de-camp in hot haste, came and went through that room for hours; and yet there I sat, unnoticed and unrecognized by any, till I began to feel in my isolation a sense of desertion and loneliness I had never known before.
It was already evening when D'Artans joined me, and taking my arm familiarly within his own, said,--
”Come along, Jasper, and let us dine together.”
The sound of my own name so overcame me that I could scarcely restrain my tears as I heard it. It was a memory of home and the past too touching to be resisted!
CHAPTER XXVII. THE BATTLE OF THE SECTIONS
There could not have been a readier process of disenchantment to me, as to all my boyish ambitions and hopes, than the routine of my daily life at this period. I was lodged, with some fourteen others, in an old Pension in the Rue des Augustines, adjoining the bureau in which we were employed. We repaired each morning at an early hour to our office, and never left it till late in the evening,--sometimes, indeed, to a late hour of the night. Neither the manners nor the habits of my companions inspired me with a desire to cultivate their intimacy. They were evidently of a low cla.s.s by birth, and with tastes even inferior to their position. They construed my estrangement to the true cause, and did not scruple to show that I was not a favorite amongst them. In ridicule of my seeming pretensions, they called me the ”Count,” and never pa.s.sed me without an obsequious mock salutation, which I returned as punctiliously, and not appearing to detect its sarcasm. With experience of life and mankind, isolation is probably a condition not devoid of certain pleasures,--it may minister to a kind of proud self-reliance and independence of spirit; but to a boy it is one of unalloyed misery. There is no heavier infliction than the want of that free expansion of the heart that comes of early friends.h.i.+p. Youth is essentially the season of confidence; and to restrain its warm impulses, and dam up the flow of its affections, is to destroy its best and highest charm. I will not venture to a.s.sert that I was not myself much to blame for the seclusion in which I lived. I probably resented too forcibly what I need scarcely have noticed, and felt too acutely what, at worst, were but trifling annoyances. Some of this may be attributed to me const.i.tutionally, but even more to the nature of my bringing up. All my boyish impulses were stimulated by affection; whatever I attempted was in a wish to gain praise; all my ambitions were to be loved the more. In my loneliness I sought out M. de Gabriac, but in vain. His lodging on the Place was now occupied by another, who could give no tidings of him whatever. I wrote to my mother and to Raper, but without receiving a reply. I then tried M. Jost, and received a few lines to say that my friends had taken their departure some months before from Reichenau, but in what direction he knew not. This letter put the finis.h.i.+ng stroke to my sense of utter desolation. It was indeed not possible to conceive a more forlorn and friendless being than I now was. By my superior in the office I was held in little favor or esteem.
I was indeed, in many respects, less capable than many of my colleagues, and it is not impossible that my apparent pride may have contrasted with my real deficiency. All these causes pressed upon me together, and made up a series of annoyances which came very little short of downright unhappiness.
My circ.u.mstances, too, were not calculated to dispel these gloomy tendencies. Beyond our maintenance, which was of the very humblest kind, our whole pay was five hundred francs yearly; and as this was paid in paper money, it reduced the actual amount more than one-fourth. By the very strictest economy, and by many an act of self-denial, I was enabled to keep myself out of debt; but it was an existence of continued watchfulness and care, and in which not even the very cheapest pleasure found a place. My colleagues, indeed, talked of cafes, restaurants, excursions, and theatres, as of matters of daily habit; but in what way they compa.s.sed such enjoyments I knew not. The very freedom of their language on these themes cast an air of contemptuous mockery over my humbler existence that a.s.suredly did not diminish its bitterness.
My inexpertness frequently compelled me to remain in the office long after the rest. The task allotted to me was often of greater length, and many times have I pa.s.sed a considerable part of the night at my desk. On these occasions, when I had finished, my head was too much excited for sleep, and I then sat up and read--usually one of the volumes Raper had given me--till morning. These were my happiest hours; but even they were alloyed by the weariness of an exhausted and tired intellect. So thoroughly apart from the world did I live, so completely did I hug my solitary existence at this period, that of the events happening around I positively knew nothing. With cafes and their company, or with newspapers, I had no intercourse; and although at moments some street encounter, some collision between the mob and the National Guard, would excite my curiosity, I never felt interest enough to inquire the cause, or care for the consequences.
Such incidents grew day by day more common; firing was frequently heard at night in different parts of the capital, and it was no rare occurrence to see carts with wounded men conveyed to hospital through the streets, at early morning. That the inhabitants were fully alive to the vicinity of some peril was plain to see. At the slightest sign of tumult, at the least warning, shops were closed and shutters fastened, doors strongly barricaded, and armed figures seen cautiously peering from cas.e.m.e.nts and parapets. At one time a single horseman at full gallop would give the signal for these precautions; at others, they seemed the result of some instinctive apprehension of danger, so rapidly and so silently were they effected. Amid all these portents, the daily life of Paris went on as before. It was just as we hear tell of in the countries where earthquakes are frequent, and where in almost every century some terrible convulsion has laid a whole city in ruins, the inhabitants acquire a strange indifference to peril till the very instant of its presence, and learn to forget calamities when once they have pa.s.sed.
As for myself, so accustomed had I become to these shocks of peril that I no longer went to the window when the uproar beneath betokened a conflict, nor even cared to see which side were conquerors in the affray. It was in a mood of this acquired indifference that I sat reading one evening in my office long after the others had taken their departure; twice or thrice had loud and prolonged shouts from the street disturbed me, but without exciting in me sufficient of curiosity to see what was going forward, when at last, hearing the rumbling sound of artillery trains as they moved past, I arose and went to the window.
To my surprise, the streets were densely crowded, an enormous concourse filling them, and only leaving a narrow lane through which the wagons could pa.s.s. That it was no mere procession was clear enough, for the gunners carried their matches lighted, and there was that in the stern air of the soldiery that bespoke service. They wheeled past the church of St. Roch, and entered a small street off the Rue St. Honore called La Dauphine, where, no sooner had they pa.s.sed in, than the sappers commenced tearing up the pavement in front of the guns, and speedily formed a trench of about five feet in depth before them. While this was doing, some mounted dragoons gave orders to the people to disperse, and directed them to move away by the side streets,--an order so promptly obeyed that in a few minutes the long line of the Rue St. Honore was totally deserted. From the position at La Dauphine to the Tuileries I could perceive that a line of communication was kept open, and orderlies pa.s.sed at a gallop frequently from one side to the other. Another circ.u.mstance, too, struck me: the windows, instead of being crowded by numbers of eager spectators, were strongly shuttered and barred; and when that was impossible, the gla.s.s frames were withdrawn, and bed-mattresses and tables placed in the s.p.a.ces. Along the parapets, also, vast crowds of armed men were to be seen, and the tower and battlements of St. Roch were studded over with soldiers of the National Guard, all armed and in readiness. From the glances of the artillerymen beneath to the groups above, it required no great prescience to detect that they stood opposed to each other as enemies.
It was a calm mellow evening of the late autumn. The air was perfectly still; and now the silence was unbroken on all sides, save when, from a distance, the quick tramp of cavalry might be momentarily heard, as if in the act of forcing back a crowd; and then a faint shout would follow, whose accents might mean triumph or defiance.
I was already beginning to weary of expectancy, when I perceived, from the movement on the house-tops and the church tower, that something was going forward within the view of those stationed there. I had not to look long for the cause, for suddenly the harsh, sharp beat of a drum was heard, and immediately after the head of a column wheeled from one of the side streets into the Rue St. Honore. They were grenadiers of the National Guard, and a fine body of men they seemed, as they marched proudly forward till they came to a halt before the steps of St.