Part 42 (1/2)

CHAPTER 6.IX.

Zukunft hast du mir gegeben, Doch du nehmst den Augenblick.

”Ka.s.sandra.”

(Futurity hast thou given to me,--yet takest from me the Moment.)

”Mejnour, behold thy work! Out, out upon our little vanities of wisdom!--out upon our ages of lore and life! To save her from Peril I left her presence, and the Peril has seized her in its grasp!”

”Chide not thy wisdom but thy pa.s.sions! Abandon thine idle hope of the love of woman. See, for those who would unite the lofty with the lowly, the inevitable curse; thy very nature uncomprehended,--thy sacrifices unguessed. The lowly one views but in the lofty a necromancer or a fiend. t.i.tan, canst thou weep?”

”I know it now, I see it all! It WAS her spirit that stood beside our own, and escaped my airy clasp! O strong desire of motherhood and nature! unveiling all our secrets, piercing s.p.a.ce and traversing worlds!--Mejnour, what awful learning lies hid in the ignorance of the heart that loves!”

”The heart,” answered the mystic, coldly; ”ay, for five thousand years I have ransacked the mysteries of creation, but I have not yet discovered all the wonders in the heart of the simplest boor!”

”Yet our solemn rites deceived us not; the prophet-shadows, dark with terror and red with blood, still foretold that, even in the dungeon, and before the deathsman, I,--I had the power to save them both!”

”But at some unconjectured and most fatal sacrifice to thyself.”

”To myself! Icy sage, there is no self in love! I go. Nay, alone: I want thee not. I want now no other guide but the human instincts of affection. No cave so dark, no solitude so vast, as to conceal her.

Though mine art fail me; though the stars heed me not; though s.p.a.ce, with its s.h.i.+ning myriads, is again to me but the azure void,--I return but to love and youth and hope! When have they ever failed to triumph and to save!”

BOOK VII. -- THE REIGN OF TERROR.

Orrida maesta nei fero aspetto Terrore accresce, e piu superbo il rende; Rosseggian gli occhi, e di veneno infetto Come infausta cometa, il guardo splende, Gil involve il mento, e sull 'irsuto petto Ispida efoita la gran barbe scende; E IN GUISA DE VORAGINE PROFONDA SAPRE LA BOCCA A'ATRO SANGUE IMMONDA.

(Ger. Lib., Cant. iv. 7.)

A horrible majesty in the fierce aspect increases it terror, and renders it more superb. Red glow the eyes, and the aspect infected, like a baleful comet, with envenomed influences, glares around. A vast beard covers the chin--and, rough and thick, descends over the s.h.a.ggy breast.--And like a profound gulf expand the jaws, foul with black gore.

CHAPTER 7.I.

Qui suis-je, moi qu'on accuse? Un esclave de la Liberte, un martyr vivant de la Republique.

--”Discours de Robespierre, 8 Thermidor.”

(Who am I,--_I_ whom they accuse? A slave of Liberty,--a living martyr for the Republic.)

It roars,--The River of h.e.l.l, whose first outbreak was chanted as the gush of a channel to Elysium. How burst into blossoming hopes fair hearts that had nourished themselves on the diamond dews of the rosy dawn, when Liberty came from the dark ocean, and the arms of decrepit Thraldom--Aurora from the bed of t.i.thon! Hopes! ye have ripened into fruit, and the fruit is gore and ashes! Beautiful Roland, eloquent Vergniaud, visionary Condorcet, high-hearted Malesherbes!--wits, philosophers, statesmen, patriots, dreamers! behold the millennium for which ye dared and laboured!

I invoke the ghosts! Saturn hath devoured his children (”La Revolution est comme Saturne, elle devorera tous ses enfans.”--Vergniaud.), and lives alone,--I his true name of Moloch!

It is the Reign of Terror, with Robespierre the king. The struggles between the boa and the lion are past: the boa has consumed the lion, and is heavy with the gorge,--Danton has fallen, and Camille Desmoulins.

Danton had said before his death, ”The poltroon Robespierre,--I alone could have saved him.” From that hour, indeed, the blood of the dead giant clouded the craft of ”Maximilien the Incorruptible,” as at last, amidst the din of the roused Convention, it choked his voice. (”Le sang de Danton t'etouffe!” (the blood of Danton chokes thee!) said Garnier de l'Aube, when on the fatal 9th of Thermidor, Robespierre gasped feebly forth, ”Pour la derniere fois, President des a.s.sa.s.sins, je te demande la parole.” (For the last time, President of a.s.sa.s.sins, I demand to speak.)) If, after that last sacrifice, essential, perhaps, to his safety, Robespierre had proclaimed the close of the Reign of Terror, and acted upon the mercy which Danton had begun to preach, he might have lived and died a monarch. But the prisons continued to reek,--the glaive to fall; and Robespierre perceived not that his mobs were glutted to satiety with death, and the strongest excitement a chief could give would be a return from devils into men.

We are transported to a room in the house of Citizen Dupleix, the menuisier, in the month of July, 1794; or, in the calendar of the Revolutionists, it was the Thermidor of the Second Year of the Republic, One and Indivisible! Though the room was small, it was furnished and decorated with a minute and careful effort at elegance and refinement.

It seemed, indeed, the desire of the owner to avoid at once what was mean and rude, and what was luxurious and voluptuous. It was a trim, orderly, precise grace that shaped the cla.s.sic chairs, arranged the ample draperies, sank the frameless mirrors into the wall, placed bust and bronze on their pedestals, and filled up the niches here and there with well-bound books, filed regularly in their appointed ranks. An observer would have said, ”This man wishes to imply to you,--I am not rich; I am not ostentatious; I am not luxurious; I am no indolent Sybarite, with couches of down, and pictures that provoke the sense; I am no haughty n.o.ble, with s.p.a.cious halls, and galleries that awe the echo. But so much the greater is my merit if I disdain these excesses of the ease or the pride, since I love the elegant, and have a taste!

Others may be simple and honest, from the very coa.r.s.eness of their habits; if I, with so much refinement and delicacy, am simple and honest,--reflect, and admire me!”

On the walls of this chamber hung many portraits, most of them represented but one face; on the formal pedestals were grouped many busts, most of them sculptured but one head. In that small chamber Egotism sat supreme, and made the Arts its looking-gla.s.ses. Erect in a chair, before a large table spread with letters, sat the original of bust and canvas, the owner of the apartment. He was alone, yet he sat erect, formal, stiff, precise, as if in his very home he was not at ease. His dress was in harmony with his posture and his chamber; it affected a neatness of its own,--foreign both to the sumptuous fas.h.i.+ons of the deposed n.o.bles, and the filthy ruggedness of the sans-culottes.