The Countess of Charny; or, The Execution of King Louis XVI

CHAPTER XXVIII.

CAGLIOSTRO'S ADVICE

On the evening of this awful day, while the pike-bearers were scouring Paris through streets illuminated but deserted, to exhibit rags dyed in blood, with shouts of "The tyrant is dead! behold his blood!" two men whose dress was different, sat in silence in a room in a house in St. Honore Street.

Dressed in black, one was sitting at a table, with his head resting on his hand, plunged into deep reverie, if not grief. The other, wearing a countryman's dress, strode up and down, with wrinkled forehead, gloomy eye, and folded arms. Every time his crossing line brought him by the table, he cast a glance on the thinker.

At last the countryman stopped and said, as he fixed his eye on the other:

"Come, now, Citizen Gilbert, am I a brigand because I voted for the king's death?"

The man in black raised his head, shook his melancholy brow, and said, holding out his hand to his companion:

"No, Billet, you are no more a brigand for that than I am an aristocrat for voting the other way. You voted according to your conscience, and I to mine. It is a terrible thing to take away from man that which you can not restore."

"So it is your opinion that despotism is inviolable," returned Billet, "liberty is revolt, and there is no justice on earth except such as kings, that is, tyrants, dispense? Then what remains for the people, the right to serve and obey? Do you, Gilbert, the pupil of Rousseau, say that?"

"No, Billet, for that would be an impiety against the people."

"Come," said the farmer, "I am going to talk to you with the roughness of my plain good sense, to which I do not mind your answering with all the sharpness of your fine wit. Do you admit that a nation, believing itself oppressed, should have the right to disestablish its church, lower or even demolish the throne, fight and make itself free?"

"Not a doubt of it."

"Then it has the right to gather in the spoils of the victory?"

"Yes, Billet; but not to compass such things with murder and violence. Remember that it is written, 'Thou shalt not kill thy neighbor.'"

"But the king was no neighbor of mine," returned Billet; "he was my enemy. I remember what my poor mother read me in the Bible of what Samuel said to the Israelites who asked him to appoint a king."

"So do I, Billet; and Samuel anointed Saul – he did not kill him.

"Oh, I know that if I get to arguing with you in book learning, I shall lose. So I simply ask you, were we right to take the Bastile?"

"Yes."

"When the king took away our right to hold a meeting, were we right to meet in another place?"

"You were."

"Had we the right, when the king gathered foreign troops at Versailles to feast them and overawe us, to take him away from among them and lodge him in Paris?"

"Yes."

"To bring him back when he tried to run away from the country?"

"Yes."

"Then we had a right to shut him up where he was so little out of mischief that he continued to correspond with the invader. Ought we not have brought him before the court for trial, to doom him, and – "

"Ay, to banish, to perpetually imprison, all except death, because, guilty in the result, he was not so in the intention. You judge him from the people's standing, Billet; but he acted like the son of kings. Was he a tyrant, as you call him? No. An oppressor of the people? No. An accomplice of aristocrats and an enemy of freedom? No."

"Then you judge him as royalty would?"

"No; for then he would have been acquitted."

"But you did so by voting for his life."

"No; with life imprisonment. Granting he was not your neighbor, but your enemy, he was a vanquished one, and ought not to have been slain in cold blood. That is not execution, but immolation. You have conferred on royalty something like martyrdom, and made justice seem vengeance. Take care! In doing too much, you have not done enough. Charles of England was executed, but his son reigned. But James II. was banished, and his sons died in exile. Human nature is humane, and you have alienated from the Republic for fifty or a hundred years the immense proportion of the population judging revolutions by their feelings. Believe me, my friend, Republicans ought most to bewail the death of Louis, for the blood will fall on them, and cost the Republic its life."

"There is some truth in what you say, Gilbert," said a voice at the door.

"Cagliostro!" exclaimed both debaters, turning with the same impulse.

"Yes; but there is also truth in what Billet said."

"That is the trouble in it," sighed Gilbert; "the cause we plead has two faces, and each, as he looks upon it, can say he is right."

"But he ought also to admit that he may be wrong."

"What is your opinion, master?" asked the doctor.

"Yes, your opinion?" said Billet.

"You have been trying the accused over again, but you should test the sentence. Had you doomed the king, you would have been right. You doomed the man, and you were wrong."

"I don't understand," said Billet.

"You ought to have slain the king amid his guards and courtiers, while unknown to the people – when he was to them a tyrant. But, after having let him live and dwell under the eyes of the private soldier, the petty civil servant, the workman, as a man, this sham abasement elevated him, and he ought to have been banished or locked up, as happens to any man."

"I did not understand you," said Billet to the doctor, "but I do the Citizen Cagliostro."

"Just think of their five months' captivity molding this lump – who was born to be a parish beadle – into a statue of courage, patience, and resignation, on a pedestal of sorrow; you sanctified him so that his wife adored him. Who would have dreamed, my dear Gilbert," said the magician, bursting into laughter, "that Marie Antoinette would ever have loved her mate?"

"Oh, if I had only guessed this," muttered Billet, "I would have slain him before! I could have done it easily."

These words were spoken with such intense patriotism that Gilbert pardoned them, while Cagliostro admired.

"But you did not do it," said the latter. "You voted for death; and you, Gilbert, for life. Now, let me give you a last piece of advice. You, Gilbert, strove to be a member of the convention to accomplish a duty; you, Billet, to fulfill vengeance; both are realized. You have nothing more to do here. Be gone."

The two stared at him.

"To-morrow, your indulgence will be regarded as a crime, and on the next day your severity as bad. Believe me, in the mortal strife preparing between hatred, fear, revenge, fanaticism, few will remain unspotted; some will be fouled with mud, some with blood. Go, my friends, go!"

"But France?" said the doctor.

"Yes, France?" echoed Billet.

"Materially," said Cagliostro, "France is saved; the external enemy is baffled, the home one dead. The Revolution holds the ax in one hand and the tri-colored flag in the other. Go in tranquillity, for before she lays them down, the aristocracy will be beheaded, and Europe conquered. Go, my friends, go to your second country, America!"