Gerald Fitzgerald, the Chevalier: A Novel

‘But there are none left, mon cher; the King himself is not one.’

‘Ready to die for the throne – ’

‘There is no throne; there is an old arm-chair, with the gilding rubbed away!’

‘At all events there was a right to defend – ’

‘The right to live has an earlier date than the right to rule,’ said Brissot gravely; and seeing that he had caught the other’s attention, he launched forth into the favourite theme of his party, the wrongs of the people. Unlike the generality of his friends, Brissot did not dwell on the vices and corruptions of the nobles. It was the evils of poverty he pictured; the hopeless condition of those whose misery made them friendless.

‘If you but knew the suffering patience of the poor,’ said he, ‘the stubbornness of their devotion to those above them in station; the tacit submission with which they accept hardship as their birthright, you would despair of humanity – infinitely more from men’s humility than from their cruelty! We cannot stir them; we cannot move them,’ cried he. ‘“They are no worse off than their fathers were,” that is their reply. If the hour come, however, that they rise up of themselves – ’

Once more did Gerald revert to the hardihood of such confessions to a stranger, when the other broke in —

‘Does the shipwrecked sailor on the raft hesitate to stretch out his hand to the sinking swimmer beside him. Come home with me from this, and let me speak to you. You will learn nothing from these men. There is Marat again! he has but one note in his voice, and it is to utter the cry of Blood!’

While the stormy speaker revelled wildly in the chaos of his incoherent thoughts, conjuring up scenes of massacre and destruction, the others madly applauding him, Brissot stole away, and beckoned Gerald to follow him.

It was daybreak ere they separated, and as Gerald gained his chambers he tore the white cockade he had long treasured as a souvenir of his days of Garde du Corps in pieces, and scattered the fragments from his window to the winds.

CHAPTER VIII. THE DÉPÔT DE LA PRÉFECTURE

Gerald had scarcely fallen asleep when he was aroused by a rude crash at his door, and looking up, saw the room filled with gendarmerie in full uniform. A man in plain black meanwhile approached the bed where he lay, and asked if he were called Gerald Fitzgerald.

‘A ci-devant Garde du Corps and a refugee too?’ said the questioner, who was the substitute of the Procureur du Roi. ‘This is the order to arrest you, Monsieur,’ said he.

‘On what charge, may I ask?’ said Gerald indolently.

‘It is a grave one,’ said the other in a solemn voice, while he pointed to certain words in the warrant.

Gerald started as he read them, and, with a smile of scornful meaning, said —

‘Is it alleged that I poisoned the Count de Mirabeau?’

‘You are included among those suspected of that crime.’

‘And was he poisoned, then?’

‘The report of the surgeons who have examined the body is not conclusive. There are, however, sufficient grounds for investigation and inquiry. You will see, sir, that I have told you as much as I may – perhaps more than I ought.’

Left alone in his chamber that he might dress, Gerald proceeded to make his preparations with becoming speed. The order committed him to St. Pélagie, a prison then reserved for those accused of great crimes against the state. Weighty as such a charge was, he felt in the fact of an unjust accusation a degree of courageous energy that he had not known for many a previous day. In the midst of one’s self-accusings and misgivings, an ill-founded allegation brings a certain sense of relief: if this be the extent of my culpability, I may be proud of my conduct, is such satisfactory judgment to address to one’s own heart. He would have felt more comfort, it is true, in the reflection, if he did not remember that it was a frequent artifice of the day to accuse men of crimes of which they were innocent, to afford time and opportunity to involve them in some more grounded charge. Many were sent to Vincennes who were never afterwards heard of; and what easier, if needed, than to dispose of one like himself, without family or friends?

Though nominally committed to St. Pélagie, such was the crowded condition of that prison that Gerald was conducted to the ‘Dépôt de la Préfecture,’ a horrible den, into which murderers, malefactors, political offenders, and thieves were indiscriminately huddled, until time offered the opportunity to sift and divide them. It was a long hall, supported on two ranges of stone pillars, with wooden guard-beds on each side, and between them a space technically called ‘the street.’ Four narrow windows, close to the roof, admitted a scanty light into this dreary abyss, where upward of eighty prisoners were already confined. By a sort of understanding among themselves, for no other direction existed, the prisoners had divided themselves into three distinct classes, each of which maintained itself apart from the others. Such as had committed capital offences or were accused of them, held the first rank, and exercised a species of general sway over all. The place occupied by them was called ‘Le Nid’; they themselves were styled the ‘Birds of Passage.’ The political criminals gathered in a corner named ‘L’Opinion ‘; the rest, a large majority, were known as ‘Les Âmes de boue.’

Gerald had but crossed the threshold of this darksome dungeon when the door closed behind him, leaving him almost in total obscurity. The heavy breathing of a number of people asleep, and the low mutterings of others suddenly awakened, showed him that the place was crowded, although as yet he could distinguish nothing. Not venturing to stir from the spot he occupied, he waited patiently till by the cold grey light of breaking day he could look at the scene before him. He was not suffered to indulge this contemplation long, for as the sleepers awoke and beheld him, a general cry was raised to pass him on to the Prévôt to be classed. Gerald obeyed the order, moving slowly up the narrow ‘street’ to the end of the hall, where sat or rather lay an old man, whose imprisonment dated upward of forty years back. He was perfectly blind, and so crippled by age and rheumatism as to be utterly helpless; but notwithstanding his infirmities his voice was loud and commanding, and its tones resounded throughout the length and breadth of the prison. After a brief routine address, informing the new arrival that for the due administration of that discipline which all societies of men demanded, he must pledge obedience to the laws of the place, and after duly promising the same, and swearing it by placing a handful of straw upon his head, Gerald was told to be seated while he was interrogated.

‘Not know where you were born,’ said the Prévôt, ‘and yet you call yourself noble! Be it so; and now your charge – what is it?’

‘They accuse me of having poisoned Mirabeau.’

‘And would that be called a crime?’ said one.

‘Against whom, I would like to know, could that be an offence?’ said another. ‘Not against the King, whom he had deserted, nor against the people whom he betrayed.’

‘Silence! – silence in the court!’ said the Prévôt; then, addressing Gerald, he went on: ‘with what object did you kill him?’

‘I did not poison him – I am innocent,’ said Gerald calmly.

‘So are we all,’ said the Prévôt devoutly – ‘spotless as the snowdrift. Who was she that persuaded you to act? – tell us her name.’

‘There was no act, and could have been no suggester.’

‘Young man,’ said the Prévôt solemnly, ‘we know of but one capital crime here, that is, concealment. Be frank, therefore, and fearless.’

‘I cannot be sure, if I had done this crime, that I would have confessed it here, but as I have not even imagined it, I repeat to you once more I know nothing of it.’

With an acuteness perfectly wonderful at his age, and with an intellect that retained much of its former subtlety – for the Prévôt had been the first lawyer at the Lyons bar – he questioned Gerald as to what had led to the accusation. Partly to display his own powers of cross-examination, and partly that the youth’s answers imparted an interest to his story, he prolonged the inquiry considerably. Nor was Gerald indisposed to speak openly about himself; it was a species of relief out of the dreary isolation in which he had recently passed his days.

To one point the old man would, however, continue to recur without success – had some womanly influence not swayed him? Whether his heart had not been touched, and some secret spring of love had given the impulse to his character, remained a mystery.

‘No man,’ said the Prévôt, ‘ever lived as you allege. He who reads Jean Jacques lives like Rousseau; he who pores over Diderot acts the fatalist.’

‘Enough of this,’ cried a rough, rude voice. ‘Is he of us or not?’

It was a ‘Bird of Passage’ that spoke, impatient for the moment when the new-comer should pay his entrance fee.

‘He is not of you, be assured of that,’ said the Prévôt, ‘and for the present his place shall be “L’Opinion.”’

By chance – a mere chance – a death on the day before had left a vacancy in that section, and thither Gerald was now with due solemnity conducted.

If his present associates were the ‘best of the bad’ around him, they were still far from being to his taste. They were the lowest emissaries of every party – the agents employed for all purposes of espionage and corruption. They affected a sort of fidelity to the cause they served while sober, but once filled with wine, avowed their utter indifference to every party, as they avowed that they took bribes from each in turn. Many, it is true, had moved in the better classes of society, were well-mannered and educated; but even through these there ran the same vein of profligacy, a tone of utter distrust, and a scepticism as to all good here and hereafter.

One or two of these remembered to have seen Gerald in his days of Garde du Corps, and were more than disposed to connect him with the scandals circulated about the Queen; others inclined to regard him as a revolutionist in the garb of the court party; none trusted him, and he lived in a kind of haughty estrangement from all. The Prévôt, indeed, liked him, and would talk with him for hours long; and to the old man himself the companionship seemed a boon. He now learned for the first time a true account of the great changes ‘without,’ as he called the world, and heard with an approach to accuracy the condition in which France then stood.

The sense of indignation at a groundless charge, the cruelty of an imprisonment upon mere suspicion, had long ceased to weigh upon Fitzgerald, and a dreamy apathy, the true lethargy of the prison, stole over him. To lie half sleeping on his hard bed, to sit crouched down, gazing listlessly at the small patch of sky seen through the window, to spell over the names scratched by former prisoners on the plaster, to count for the thousandth time the fissures in the damp walls – these filled his days. His nights were drearier still, tormented with distressing dreams, to be dispelled only by the gloom of awaking in a dungeon.

At intervals of a week or two, orders would come for this or that prisoner to be delivered to the care of the Marshal of the Temple – none knew for what, though all surmised the worst, since not one was seen to return; and so time sped on, month after month, death and removal doing their work, till at last Gerald was the oldest détenu in the section of ‘L’Opinion.’

The fatuous vacuity of his mind was such that though he heard the voices around him, and even tried at times to follow what they said, he could collect nothing of it: sometimes the sounds would simply seem to weary and fatigue him – they acted as some deep monotonous noise might have done on a tired brain; sometimes they would cause the most intense irritation, exciting him to a sense of anger he could with difficulty control; and at others, again, they would overcome him so thoroughly with sorrow, that he would weep for hours. How time passed, what he had himself been in former years, where and how and with whom he lived, only recurred to him in short fitful passages, like the scenes of some moving panorama, present for a moment and then lost to view. He would fancy, too, that he had many distinct and separate existences, as many deaths; and then marvel to himself in which of these states he was at that moment.

His wild talk; his absurd answers when questioned; the incoherent things he would say, stamped him among his fellow-prisoners as one bereft of reason; nor was there, to all seeming, much injustice in the suspicion. If the chance mention of some name he once knew would start and arouse him, his very observations would appear those of a wandering intellect, since he seemed to have been acquainted with persons the most opposite and incongruous; and it even became a jest – a sort of prison ‘plaisanterie’ – to ask him whether he was not intimate with this man or that, mentioning persons the least likely for him ever to have met.

‘There goes another of your friends, Maître,’ said one to him: ‘they have guillotined Brissot this morning; you surely knew him, he edited the Droit du Peuple.’

‘Yes, I knew him. Poor Brissot!’ said Gerald, with a sigh.

‘What was he like, Maître? was he short and thick, with a beard like mine?’

‘No, he was fair and gentle-looking.’