WE SHALL NOT attempt to say how this night passed for the two women.
At nine o'clock in the morning only, we shall again seek the queen: her eyes are red with tears, her cheeks pale from want of sleep.
During some moments, although, after the orders given, no one dare enter her chamber, she heard around her apartment those comings and goings, those prolonged whisperings and murmurs, which announce that something unusual is passing without. In the midst of all these confused sounds, which seemed to flit along the corridor, she heard the voice of Weber, who ordered silence.
She summoned the faithful valet de chambre.
“What is it then, Weber?” asked the queen. “What is passing in the chateau? and what do these sounds mean?”
“Madame,” said Weber, “there is a fight on the part of the Cite.”
“A fight!” said the queen; “and to what purpose?”
“No one knows as yet, madame; they merely say that it is an emeute on account of the bread.”
At another time he would not have broached the idea to the queen that there were people who were dying of hunger; but since, during the journey to Versailles, she had heard the dauphin ask her for bread, without being able to give him any, she understood now the misery of famine and hunger.
“Poor people!” murmured she, recalling the words which she had heard on the route, and the explanation which Gilbert had given to these words, “they see well now that it is not the fault of either the baker or the bakery, that they have not the bread.”
“And do they not fear that it may become a grave matter?” she asked.
“I cannot tell you, madame. There are no two reports alike,” answered Weber.
“Well!” replied the queen, “run as far as the Cite, Weber; it is not far from here; see with your own eyes what is passing, and return to me here.”
Weber left the chateau, gained the passage of the Louvre, darted over the bridge, and guided by the shouts, and following the wave that rolled itself onwards towards the archiepiscopal palace, he arrived on the Place de Notre-Dame.
In proportion as he advanced towards the old part of Paris, the crowd became thicker and the shouts more vigorous.
In the midst of these cries, or rather of these shrieks, voices were heard, such as are only heard in the skies in days of tempest, and on the earth in the days of revolution. Voices cried out, “He is a forestaller! a mort! a mort! a la lanterne! a la lanterne!”
And thousands of voices which did not know what this all meant, and those of many women, boldly repeated, “He is a forestaller! a mort! a mort! a la lanterne! a la lanterne!”
All at once, Weber felt himself struck by one of those shocks which occur in great masses of men, when a stream establishes itself, and he perceived coming up the Rue Chanoinesse a human tide, a living cataract, in the midst of which struggled an unfortunate being, pale, and with torn clothes.
It was after him that all these people hurried: it was against him that they raised their lamentations, their shrieks, their menaces.
One single man defended him against this crowd; a single man only tried to dam this human current.
The man who had undertaken this labour of pity, in spite of ten, twenty, a hundred men, was Gilbert.
It is true that some amongst the crowd, having recognised him, commenced to cry out—
“It is Dr. Gilbert, a patriot, the friend of M. Lafayette and of M. Bailly. Listen to Dr. Gilbert.”
At these cries there was a halt for a moment, something like the calm that spreads itself over the waters betwixt two squalls. Weber profited by them to make his way to the doctor.
He accomplished this with great difficulty. “Dr. Gilbert .'“ said the valet de chambre.
“Ah!” said he, “is it you, Weber?”
And then he made him a sign to come nearer.
“Go,” said he in a low tone, “and announce to the queen that I shall come to her perhaps later than she expects me. I am busy saving a man.”
“Oh, yes! Yes!” said the unhappy hearer of these last words, “you will save me, will you not, doctor? Tell them I am innocent, tell them that my young wife is enceinte! I swear to you that I did not conceal any bread, doctor.”
But as if the plea and the prayer of the wretched one had only added fuel to hatred and anger half smouldered out, the cries redoubled, and the menaces seemed about to be fulfilled.
“My friends!” cried Gilbert, opposing himself to the crowd with an almost superhuman force, “this man is a Frenchman, a citizen like yourselves; we must not, we cannot, destroy a man without hearing him. Conduct him to the court, and afterwards we'll see.”
“Yes! yes!” cried some voices, belonging to those who had recognised the doctor.
“M. Gilbert,” said the valet de chambre of the queen, “hold your own. I will go and warn the officers of the district; the Court is only a few paces off; in five minutes they shall be here.”
And he slipped off and was lost in the crowd, without even waiting for the approbation of Gilbert.
Meanwhile, four or five people had come to assist the doctor, and had formed a rampart with their bodies round the unhappy one threatened with the anger of the crowd.
This rampart, weak as it was, restrained for a few moments the mutineers, who still continued to cry down the voice of Gilbert with their shouts, and those of the good citizens who had rallied round him.
Happily, at the end of five minutes a movement was perceptible in the crowd; a murmur succeeded this; and this murmur was followed by the words:
“The officers of the district! the officers of the district!” Before the officers of the ward-the threats lessened, the crowd opened. The assassins had not, as yet, the word of command.
They conducted the wretched prisoner to the Hotel de Ville. He kept fast hold of the doctor: he held him by the arm, he would not leave him.
He is a poor baker, named Denis Francois, the same whose name we have already pronounced, and who furnishes the rolls to the Assembly.
This morning an old woman went into his shop in the Rue du Marche-Palu at the very moment when he was about to deliver his sixth baking of bread and begin to knead the seventh.
The old woman asked for bread.
Francois said he had none: “But wait until my seventh baking, and you shall be served first.”
“I wish for some directly,” said the woman; “here is the money.”
“But,” said the baker, “it is true, as I say, there is no more.”
“Oh,” said the baker, “enter, see for yourself, search everywhere—I should like nothing better.”
The old woman goes in, seeks all over, ferrets about, opens a cupboard, and in this cupboard finds three rolls of about four pounds each, that the boys had put away for themselves.
She took one of them, went out without paying, and when the baker claimed the bread, she roused the people by crying that Francois was a forestaller, and that he had concealed half his baking.
An ancient recruiter of dragoons, called Fleur d'Epine, who was drinking in a public-house opposite, rushed out of the house and took up the cry of the old woman.
At this double cry, the people ran together, shouting, seized him who is here now, repeated the forced cries, rushed to the shop of the baker, forced the guard of four men the police had stationed at his door, as at that of his neighbours, spread themselves about the shop, and, besides the two rasped rolls left and denounced by the old woman, found ten dozen small rolls, retained for the use of the deputies, who were holding a sitting at the archbishop's palace, that is to say, a hundred steps from there.
The wretched baker is immediately condemned. One voice, a hundred voices, two hundred, a thousand voices cry out, “Down with the forestaller!”
There is quite a crowd, who howl, “a la lanterne! a la lanterne!”
At this moment the doctor, who was returning from making a visit to his son, whom he had again brought back to the Abbe Berardier, at the college of Louis le Grand, is attracted by the noise; he sees a lot of people who demand the death of this man, and he rushes forward to succour him.
There, in a few words, he learned from Francois of what he was accused. He knew the innocence of the baker, and so he had tried to defend him.
Then the crowd had pressed together, and threatened the poor baker and his defender. They anathematized both in the same words, and were ready to kill both with the same blow.
It was at this moment that Weber had arrived at the Place Notre Dame and had recognised Gilbert.
We have seen how, after the departure of Weber, the officers of the ward had arrived, and had conducted the unhappy baker, under their escort, to the Hotel de Ville.
Accused, officers, and the irritated people, all had entered pele-mele into the Hotel de Ville, whose every place was immediately filled by workmen without work, and poor devils dying with hunger, always ready to mix themselves up in any emeute, and to bestow a part of the evils which they were undergoing on any one whom they suspected of being the cause of the public suffering.
Scarcely had the miserable Francois disappeared through the doorway of the Hotel de Ville than the cries were redoubled.
Some individuals, with features quite sinister, threaded the crowd, saying in a whisper:
“He is a forestaller, paid by the court; see, then, why they wish to save him!”
And these words, “He is a forestaller! he is a forestaller!” wound, serpent-like, through the midst of the angry crowd.
Unfortunately, it was still morning; and none of the men who had power over the people, neither Bailly nor Lafayette, were there.
Those who kept repeating in the crowd, “He is a forestaller! he is a forestaller!” knew this well.
At length, when they did not see the accused reappear, the cries changed into one immense hurrah! the threats into one universal howl!
These men of whom we have spoken slid through the door, climbed along the galleries, and penetrated even as far as the room where was the unhappy baker, whom Gilbert was defending to the best he could.
On the other side, the neighbours of Francois, who had joined the tumult, persisted in declaring that he had given, since the commencement of the revolution, continual proofs of zeal; that he had kneaded us many as ten bakings a day: that as long as his brother bakers had wanted flour they had it from his own stock; and that in order to serve the public more promptly, besides his own oven, he had rented that of a pastrycook, whom he had made dry his wood for him.
When these depositions were at an end, it appeared that-instead of punishment the man deserved a reward.
But on the Place, on the galleries, and even in the saloon, they continued to cry, “Down with the forestaller!” and cried aloud for his death.
All at once, a sudden rush was made in the saloon, opening the circle of the National Guard, which environed Francois, and separating him from his protectors. Gilbert, crowded back to the side of the tribunal, saw twenty arms stretched out; seized, drawn, dragged by them, the accused cried for aid, for help—suppliantly stretched out his hands, but uselessly—as uselessly did Gilbert make a desperate effort to rejoin him. The opening by which Francois had disappeared, little by little closed upon him; as a swimmer drawn down by a whirlpool, he had struggled a moment, with clasped hand?, despair in his eyes, his voice gurgling in his throat, till the waves had covered him and the gulf had swallowed him up.
Deserted at this moment, he was lost.
Hurried down the staircase, at each step he had received a wound. When he arrived at the door, all his body was one vast sore.
It is no longer life which he begs—it is death!
In one second, the head of the unhappy Francois was separated from his body and raised on the end of a pike.
On hearing the cries in the street, the rioters in the galleries and in the chambers rush out. They must see the sight to the end.
It is curious sight, a head on the end of a pike! It is already the 21st, and they have never seen one since the 6th of October.
“Oh! Billot! Billot!” murmured Gilbert, as he passed from the hall, “how happy thou art to have left Paris!”
He traversed the Place de Greve, following the border of the Seine, and leaving afar off the bloody head and its howling convoy, by the bridge of Notre Dame, until he had got half across the Quai Pelletier, when he suddenly felt some one touch his arm.
lie raised his head—uttered a cry, and would have stopped and spoken; but the man, whom he had recognised, had slipped a note into his hand, placed a finger on his mouth, and drew off, going to the side of the archbishop's palace.
Without doubt this person wished to preserve an incognito, but a woman of the Halle, having seen him, clapped her hands and cried:
“Vive Mirabeau!” cried immediately some five hundred voices; “vive the defender of the people, vive our patriotic orator!”
And the tail of the cortege which followed the head of the unfortunate Francois, hearing this cry, returned, and formed an escort for Mirabeau, who was accompanied by a large crowd, always cheering, until he reached the archbishop's palace.
It was indeed Mirabeau, who, returning from the sitting in the Assembly, had met Gilbert, and had given him a note which he had just written on the counter of a shop, and which he supposed would make him come to his house.
