“How? the national cockade has as yet done nothing?” cried Billot. “Has it not taken the Bastille?”
“It has,” said Gilbert, sorrowfully; “you are right, Billot.”
“And that is why,” triumphantly rejoined the farmer,—”that is why the king ought to adopt it.”
Gilbert gave a furious nudge with his elbow into Billot’s ribs, for he had perceived the king was listening, and then, in a low tone:—
“Are you mad, Billot?” said he; “and against whom was the Bastille taken, then? Against royalty, it seems to me. And now you would make the king wear the trophies of your triumph and the insignia of his own defeat. Madman! the king is all heart, all goodness, all candor, and you would wish him to show himself a hypocrite!”
“But,” said Billot, more humbly, without, however, giving up the argument altogether, “it was not precisely against the king that the Bastille was taken; it was against despotism.”
Gilbert shrugged up his shoulders, but with the delicacy of the superior man, who will not place his foot on his inferior, for fear that he should crush him.
“No,” said Billot, again becoming animated, “it is not against our good king that we have fought, but against his satellites.”
Now, in those days they said, speaking politically, satellites instead of saying soldiers, as they said in the theatres, courser instead of horse.
“Moreover,” continued Billot, and with some appearance of reason, “he disapproves them, since he comes thus in the midst of us; and if he disapproves them, he must approve us. It is for our happiness and his honor that we have worked,—we, the conquerors of the Bastille.”
“Alas! alas!” murmured Gilbert, who did not know how to reconcile the appearance of the king’s features with that which he knew must be passing in his heart.
As to the king, he began, amid the confused murmurs of the march, to understand some few words of the conversation entered into by his side.
Gilbert, who perceived the attention which the king was paying to the discussion, made every effort to lead Billot on to less slippery ground than that on which he had ventured.
Suddenly the procession stopped; it had arrived at the Cours la Reine, at the gate formerly called La Conférence, in the Champs Élysées.
There a deputation of electors and aldermen, presided over by the new mayor, Bailly, had drawn themselves up in fine array, with a guard of three hundred men, commanded by a colonel, besides at least three hundred members of the National Assembly, taken, as it will be readily imagined, from the ranks of the Tiers État.
Two of the electors united their strength and their address to hold in equilibrium a vast salver of gilt plate, upon which were lying two enormous keys,—the keys of the city of Paris during the days of Henry IV.
This imposing spectacle at once put a stop to all individual conversations; and every one, whether in the crowd or in the ranks, immediately directed their attention to the speeches about to be pronounced on the occasion.
Bailly, the worthy man of science, the admirable astronomer, who had been made a deputy in defiance to his own will, a mayor in spite of his objections, an orator notwithstanding his unwillingness, had prepared a long speech. This speech had for its exordium, according to the strictest laws of rhetoric, a laudatory encomium on the king, from the coming into power of Monsieur Turgot down to the taking of the Bastille. Little was wanting, such privilege has eloquence, to attribute to the king the initiative in the measures which the people had been compelled unwillingly to adopt.
Bailly was delighted with the speech he had prepared, when an incident (it is Bailly himself who relates this incident in his Memoirs) furnished him with a new exordium, very much more picturesque than the one he had prepared,—the only one, moreover, which remained engraved on the minds of the people, always ready to seize upon good and, above all, fine-sounding phrases, when founded upon a material fact.
While walking towards the place of meeting, with the aldermen and the electors, Bailly was alarmed at the weight of the keys which he was about to present to the king.