Maurice Tiernay, Soldier of Fortune. Lever Charles James
was too young to know how deep my debt of gratitude ought to be. I had not tasted the sorrows of utter desertion; nor did I know from what a hurricane of blood and anarchy Fortune had rescued me; still I accepted the père’s benevolent offer with a thankful heart, and turned to him at once as to all that was left to me in the world.
All this time, it may be wondered how I neither spoke nor thought of my mother, if she were indeed such; but for several weeks before my father’s death I had never seen her, nor did he ever once allude to her. The reserve thus imposed upon me remained still, and I felt as though it would have been like a treachery to his memory were I now to speak of her whom, in his lifetime, I had not dared to mention.
The père lost no time in diverting my mind from the dreadful events I had so lately witnessed. The next morning, soon after daybreak, I was summoned to attend him to the little church of St. Blois, where he said mass. It was a very humble little edifice, which once had been the private chapel of a château, and stood in a weed-grown, neglected garden, where broken statues and smashed fountains bore evidence of the visits of the destroyer. A rude effigy of St. Blois, upon whom some profane hand had stuck a Phrygian cap of liberty, and which none were bold enough to displace, stood over the doorway; except this, not a vestige of ornament or decoration existed. The altar, covered with a white cloth, displayed none of the accustomed emblems; and a rude crucifix of oak was the only symbol of the faith remaining. Small as was the building, it was even too spacious for the few who came to worship. The terror which prevailed on every side – the dread that devotion to religion should be construed into an adherence to the monarchy, that submission to God should be interpreted as an act of rebellion against the sovereignty of human will – had gradually thinned the numbers, till at last the few who came were only those whose afflictions had steeled them against any reverses, and who were ready martyrs to whatever might betide them. These were almost exclusively women – the mothers and wives of those who had sealed their faith with their blood in the terrible Place de Grève. Among them was one whose dress and appearance, although not different from the rest, always created a movement of respect as she passed in or out of the chapel. She was a very old lady, with hair white as snow, and who led by the hand a little girl of about my own age; her large dark eyes and brilliant complexion giving her a look of unearthly beauty in that assemblage of furrowed cheeks, and eyes long dimmed by weeping. It was not alone that her features were beautifully regular, or that their lines were fashioned in the very perfection of symmetry, but there was a certain character in the expression of the face so different from all around it, as to be almost electrical in effect. Untouched by the terrible calamities that weighed on every heart, she seemed, in the glad buoyancy of her youth, to be at once above the very reach of sorrow, like one who bore a charmed fate, and whom Fortune had exempted from all the trials of this life. So at least did I read those features, as they beamed upon me in such a contrast to the almost stern character of the sad and sorrow-struck faces of the rest.
It was a part of my duty to place a footstool each morning for the ‘Marquise,’ as she was distinctively called, and on these occasions it was that I used to gaze upon that little girl’s face with a kind of admiring wonder that lingered in my heart for hours after. The bold look with which she met mine, if it at first half abashed, at length encouraged me; and as I stole noiselessly away, I used to feel as though I carried with me some portion of that high hope which bounded within her own heart. Strange magnetism! it seemed as though her spirit whispered to me not to be downhearted or depressed – that the sorrows of life came and went as shadows pass over the earth – that the season of mourning was fast passing, and that for us the world would wear a brighter and more glorious aspect.
Such were the thoughts her dark eyes revealed to me, and such the hopes I caught up from her proud features.
It is easy to colour a life of monotony; any hue may soon tinge the outer surface, and thus mine speedily assumed a hopeful cast; not the less decided, that the distance was lost in vague uncertainty. The nature of my studies – and the père kept me rigidly to the desk – offered little to the discursiveness of fancy. The rudiments of Greek and Latin, the lives of saints and martyrs, the litanies of the Church, the invocations peculiar to certain holy-days, chiefly filled up my time, when not sharing those menial offices which our poverty exacted from our own hands.
Our life was of the very simplest; except a cup of coffee each morning at daybreak, we took but one meal; our drink was always water. By what means even the humble fare we enjoyed was procured I never knew, for I never saw money in the père’s possession, nor did he ever appear to buy anything.
For about two hours in the week I used to enjoy entire liberty, as the père was accustomed every Saturday to visit certain persons of his flock who were too infirm to go abroad. On these occasions he would leave me with some thoughtful injunction about reflection or pious meditation, perhaps suggesting, for my amusement, the life of St. Vincent de Paul, or some other of those adventurous spirits whose missions among the Indians are so replete with heroic struggles; but still with free permission for me to walk out at large and enjoy myself as I liked best. We lived so near the outer boulevard that I could already see the open country from our windows; but fair and enticing as seemed the sunny slopes of Montmartre – bright as glanced the young leaves of spring in the gardens at its foot – I ever turned my steps into the crowded city, and sought the thoroughfares where the great human tide rolled fullest.
There were certain spots which held a kind of supernatural influence over me – one of these was the Temple, another was the Place de Grève. The window at which my father used to sit, from which, as a kind of signal, I have so often seen his red kerchief floating, I never could pass now, without stopping to gaze at – now, thinking of him who had been its inmate; now, wondering who might be its present occupant. It needed not the onward current of population that each Saturday bore along, to carry me to the Place de Grève. It was the great day of the guillotine, and as many as two hundred were often led out to execution. Although the spectacle had now lost every charm of excitement to the population, from its frequency, it had become a kind of necessity to their existence, and the sight of blood alone seemed to slake that feverish thirst for vengeance which no sufferings appeared capable of satiating. It was rare, however, when some great and distinguished criminal did not absorb all the interest of the scene. It was at that period when the fierce tyrants of the Convention had turned upon each other, and sought, by denouncing those who had been their bosom friends, to seal their new allegiance to the people. There was something demoniacal in the exultation with which the mob witnessed the fate of those whom, but a few weeks back, they had acknowledged as their guides and teachers. The uncertainty of human greatness appeared the most glorious recompense to those whose station debarred them from all the enjoyments of power, and they stood by the death-agonies of their former friends with a fiendish joy that all the sufferings of their enemies had never yielded.
To me the spectacle had all the fascination that scenes of horror exercise over the mind of youth. I knew nothing of the terrible conflict, nothing of the fierce passions enlisted in the struggle, nothing of the sacred names so basely polluted, nothing of that remorseless vengeance with which the low born and degraded were still hounded on to slaughter. It was a solemn and a fearful sight, but it was no more; and I gazed upon every detail of the scene with an interest that never wandered from the spot whereon it was enacted. If the parade of soldiers, of horse, foot, and artillery, gave these scenes a character of public justice, the horrible mobs, who chanted ribald songs, and danced around the guillotine, suggested the notion of popular vengeance; so that I was lost in all my attempts to reconcile the reasons of these executions with the circumstances that accompanied them.
Not daring to inform the Père Michel of where I had been, I could not ask him for any explanation; and thus was I left to pick up from the scattered phrases of the crowd what was the guilt alleged against the criminals. In many cases the simple word ‘Chouan,’ of which I knew not the import, was all I heard; in others, jeering allusions to former rank and station would be uttered; while against some the taunt would imply that they had shed tears over others who fell as enemies of the people, and that such sympathy was a costly pleasure to be paid for but with a life’s-blood. Such entire possession of me had these awful sights taken, that I lived in a continual dream of them. The sound of every cart-wheel recalled the dull rumble of the hurdle – every distant sound seemed like the far-off hum of the coming multitude – every sudden