In consequence, the inhabitants of Haramont, seeing themselves favored by this second return of Pitou, which they no longer hoped for, received him with every manifestation of respect and consideration, entreating him to doff for a time his warlike accoutrements, and fix his tent under the four linden-trees which overshadowed the little village square, as the Thessalians used to entreat Mars on the anniversary of his great triumphs.
Pitou deigned the more readily to consent to this, from its being his intention to fix his domicile at Haramont. He therefore accepted the shelter of a bedroom which a warlike person of the village let to him ready furnished.
It was furnished with a deal bedstead, a paillasse, and a mattress, two chairs, a table, and a water-jug.
The rent of the whole of this was estimated by the proprietor himself at six livres per annum; that is to say, the value of two dishes of fowl and rice.
The rent being agreed upon, Pitou took possession of his domicile, and supplied those who had accompanied him with refreshments at his own charge; and as these events—without speaking of the cider he had imbibed—had somewhat excited his brain, he pronounced an harangue to them, standing on the threshold of his new residence.
This harangue of Pitou was a great event, and consequently all Haramont was assembled round the house.
Pitou was somewhat of a clerk, and knew what fine language was; he knew the eight words by which at that period the haranguers of nations—it was thus Homer called them—stirred up the popular masses.
Between Monsieur de Lafayette and Pitou there was undoubtedly a great distance, but between Haramont and Paris the distance was greater still; morally speaking, it will be clearly understood.
Pitou commenced by an exordium with which the Abbé Fortier, critical as he was, would not have been dissatisfied.
“Citizens,” said he, “citizens,—this word is sweet to pronounce,—I have already addressed other Frenchmen by it, for all Frenchmen are brothers; but on this spot I am using it, I believe, towards real brothers, and I find my whole family here in my compatriots of Haramont.”
The women—there were some few among the auditory, and they were not the most favorably disposed towards the orator, for Pitou’s knees were still too thick, and the calves of his legs too thin, to produce an impression in his favor on a feminine audience—the women, on hearing the word “family,” thought of that poor Pitou, the orphan child, the poor abandoned lad, who, since the death of his mother, had never had a meal that satisfied his hunger. And this word “family,” uttered by a youth who had none, moved in some among them that sensitive fibre which closes the reservoir of tears.
The exordium being finished, Pitou began the narrative, the second head of an oration.
He related his journey to Paris, the riots with regard to the busts, the taking of the Bastille, and the vengeance of the people; he passed lightly over the part he had taken in the combats on the Place Vendôme, the square before the Palais Royal, and in the Faubourg St. Antoine. But the less he boasted, the greater did he appear in the eyes of his compatriots; and at the end of Pitou’s narrative, his helmet had become as large as the dome of the Invalides, and his sabre as long as the steeple of Haramont church.
The narrative being ended, Pitou then proceeded to the confirmation, that delicate operation by which Cicero recognized a real orator.
He proved that popular indignation had been justly excited against speculators; he said two words of Messieurs Pitt, father and son; he explained the Revolution by the privileges granted to the nobility and to the clergy; finally, he invited the people of Haramont to do that in particular which the people of France had done generally,—that is to say, to unite against the common enemy.
Then he went on from the confirmation to the peroration, by one of those sublime changes common to all great orators.
He let fall his sabre; and while picking it up, he accidentally drew it from its scabbard.
This accident furnished him with a text for an incendiary resolution, calling upon the inhabitants of Haramont to take up arms, and to follow the example of the revolted Parisians.