The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty

“Oh, son of Marquis Bouille, commander of Metz?” said the King, with a slight start not escaping the young man.

“The same, Sire,” he spoke up quickly.

“Excuse me not knowing you, but I have short sight. Have you been long in town?”

“I left Metz five days ago; and being here without official furlough but under special permission from my father, I solicited my kinsman the marquis for the honor of presentation to your Majesty.”

“You were very right, my lord, for nobody could so well present you at any hour, and from no one could the introduction come more agreeably.”

The words “at any hour” meant that Lafayette had the public and private entry to the King. The few words from the sovereign put the young count on his guard. The question about his coming signified that he wanted to know if Charny had seen his father.

Meanwhile Lafayette was looking round curiously where few penetrated; he admired the regularity with which the tools were laid out. He blew the bellows as the apprentice.

“So your Majesty has undertaken an important work, eh?” queried Lafayette, embarrassed how to talk to a King who was in a smutty apron, with tucked up sleeves and had a file in his hand.

“Yes, general, I have set to making our magnus opus a lock. I tell you just what I am doing or we shall have Surgeon Marat saying that I am forging the fetters of France. Tell him it is not so, if you lay hold of him. I suppose you are not a smith, Bouille?”

“At least I was bound apprentice, and to a locksmith, too.”

“I remember, your nurse’s husband was a smith and your father, although not much of a student of Rousseau acted on his advice in ‘Emile’ that everybody should learn a craft, and bound you to the workbench.”

“Exactly; so that if your Majesty wanted a boy – “

“An apprentice would not be so useful to me as a master,” returned the King. “I am afraid I have ventured on too hard a job. Oh, that I had my teacher Gamain, who used to say he was a crafts-master above the masters.”

“Is he dead, my lord?”

“No,” replied the King, giving the young gentleman a glance for him to be heedful; “he lives in Versailles, but the dear fellow does not dare come and see me at the Tuileries for fear he will get an ill name. All my friends have gone away, to London, Turin or Coblentz. Still, my dear general, if you do not see any inconvenience in the old fellow coming with one of his boys to lend me a hand, I might ask him to drop in some day.”

“Your Majesty ought to know perfectly that he can see and send for anybody.”

“Yes, on condition that you sentries search them as the revenue officers do those suspected of smuggling; poor Gamain will believe he is to be hanged, drawn and quartered if they found his bag of tools on him and took his three-cornered file for a stiletto!”

“Sire, I do not know how to excuse myself to your Majesty, but I am answerable for your person to the Powers of Europe, and I cannot take too many precautions for that precious life to be protected. As for the honest fellow of whom we are speaking, the King can give what orders he pleases.”

“Very well; thank you, marquis; I might want him in a week or ten days – him and his ’prentice,” he added, with a glance at Bouille; “I could notify him by my valet Durey, who is a friend of his.”

“He has only to call to be shown up to the King; his name will suffice. Lord preserve me from getting the title of your jailer, Sire; never was the monarch more free; and I have even desired your Majesty to resume hunting and riding out.”

“Thank you, but no more hunts for me! Besides, you see I have something to keep me in doors, in my head. As for traveling, that is another matter; the last trip from Versailles to Paris cured me of the desire to travel, in such a large party at all events.”

He threw a glance to Bouille who ventured to blink to show that he understood.

“Are you soon going back to your father?” inquired the King of the latter.

“Sire, I am leaving Paris in a couple of days to pay a visit to my grandmother, living in Versailles; I am bound to pay my respects. Then I am charged by my father to attend to a rather important family matter, for which I expect to see the person who will give me the directions in about a week. So I shall hardly be with my father before the first week in December, unless the King has particular reasons for me to see him sooner.”

“No, my lord, take your time; go to Versailles and transact your business and when done, go and tell the marquis, that I do not forget him as one of my faithful lieges, and that I will speak of him one of these days to General Lafayette for him to advance him.”

Lafayette smiled faintly at this allusion to his omnipotence.

“Sire,” he said, “I should have long ago recommended Marquis Bouille to your Majesty had he not been my kinsman. The fear of raising the cry that I am looking after my family alone prevented me doing him this justice.”

“This chimes in nicely, then; we will speak of this matter again.”

“The King will kindly allow me to say that my father would consider any change of a post a disgrace that robbed him of the chance to serve your Majesty particularly.”

“Oh, that is fully understood, count,” responded Louis the King, “and Marquis Bouille shall not be moved without it being according to his desires and mine. Let General Lafayette and I manage this, and you run to your pleasure-making without altogether forgetting business. Good bye, gentlemen!”

He dismissed them with a majestic manner in singular contrast with the vulgar attire.

“Come, come,” he said to himself, when the door was shut. “I believe the young blade has comprehended me, and that in a week or so we shall have Master Gamain coming to aid me, with his ’prentice.”

CHAPTER XXIV

HAPPY FAMILY

ON the evening of this same day, about five, a scene passed in the third and top flat of a dirty old tumbledown house in Juiverie Street which we would like our readers to behold.

The interior of the sitting-room denoted poverty, and it was inhabited by three persons, a man, a woman, and a boy.

The man looked to be over fifty; he was wearing an old uniform of a French Guards sergeant, a habit venerated since these troops sided with the people in the riots and exchanged shots with the German dragoons.

He was dealing out playing cards and trying to find an infallible means of winning; a card by his side, pricked full of pinholes, showed that he was keeping tally of the runs.

The woman was four-and-thirty and appeared forty; she wore an old silk dress; her poverty was the more dreadful as she exhibited tokens of splendor; her hair was built up in a knot over a brass comb once gilded: and her hands were scrupulously cared for with the nails properly trimmed in an aristocratic style. The slippers on her feet, over openwork stockings, had been worked with gold and silver.

Her face might pass in candlelight for about thirty; but, without paint and powder it looked five years older than reality.

Its resemblance to Queen Marie Antoinette’s was still so marked that one tried to recall it in the dusty clouds thrown up by royal horses around the window of a royal coach.

The boy was five years of age; his hair curled like a cherub’s; his cheeks were round as an apple; he had his mother’s diabolical eyes, and the sensual mouth of his father – in short, the idleness and whims of the pair.

He wore a faded pearl velvet suit and while munching a hunk of cake sandwiched with preserves, he frayed out the ends of an old tricolored scarf inside a pearl gray felt hat.

The family was illuminated by a candle with a large “thief in the gutter,” stuck in a bottle for holder, which light fell on the man and left most of the room in darkness.

“Mamma,” the child broke the silence by saying, as he threw the end of the cake on the mattress which served as bed, “I am tired of that kind of cake – faugh! I want a stick of red barley sugar candy.”

“Dear little Toussaint,” said the woman. “Do you hear that, Beausire?”

As the gamester was absorbed in his calculations, she lifted her foot within snatch of her hand and taking off the slipper, cast it to his nose.

“What is the matter?” he demanded, with plain ill-humor.

“Toussaint wants some candy, being tired of cheap cake.”

“He shall have it to-morrow.”