“Count! Count!—what is it gives you this fatal forewarning?”
“Alas! Madame,” replied De Charny, shaking his head, “and I too, during that fatal American war, I too was affected like the rest with that fever of independence which pervaded all society. I too wished to take an active part in the emancipation of the slaves, as it was customary to say in those days; and I was initiated into the secrets of masonry. I became affiliated with a secret society, with the Lafayettes and the Lameths. Do you know what the object of this society was, Madame? The destruction of thrones. Do you know what it had for its motto? Three letters,—L. P. D.”
“And what did these letters signify?”
“Lilia pedibus destrue!—Trample the lilies underfoot!”
“Then, what did you do?”
“I withdrew with honor. But for one who withdrew from the society, there were twenty who applied to be admitted into it. Well, then, what is happening to-day, Madame, is the prologue to the grand drama which has been preparing in silence and in darkness for twenty years. At the head of the men who are stimulating Paris to resistance, who govern the Hôtel de Ville, who occupy the Palais-Royal, and who took the Bastille, I recognized the countenances of my former affiliated brethren. Do not deceive yourself, Madame; all the events which have just taken place are not the results of chance; they are outbreaks which had been planned for years.”
“Oh, you think so!—you think so, my friend!” exclaimed the queen, bursting into tears.
“Do not weep, Madame, but endeavor to comprehend the present crisis,” said the count.
“You wish me to comprehend it!” continued Marie Antoinette. “I, the queen,—I, who was born the sovereign of twenty-five millions of men,—you wish me to understand how these twenty-five millions of subjects, born to obey me, should revolt and murder my friends! No,—that I shall never comprehend.”
“And yet it is absolutely necessary for you to understand it, Madame; for the moment this obedience becomes a burden to these subjects, to these men born to obey you, you become their enemy; and until they have the strength to devour you, to do which they are sharpening their famished teeth, they will devour your friends, still more detested than you are.”
“And perhaps you will next tell me that they are right, most sage philosopher,” exclaimed the queen, imperiously, her eyes dilated, and her nostrils quivering with anger.
“Alas! yes, Madame, they are right,” said the count, in his gentle and affectionate voice; “for when I drive along the Boulevards, with my beautiful English horses, my coat glittering with gold, and my attendants bedecked with more silver than would be necessary to feed three families, your people, that is to say, those twenty-five millions of starving men, ask themselves of what use I am to them,—I, who am only a man like themselves.”
“You serve them with this, Marquis,” exclaimed the queen, seizing the hilt of the count’s sword; “you serve them with the sword that your father wielded so heroically at Foutenoy, your grandfather at Steinkirk, your great-grandfather at Lens and at Rocroi, your ancestors at Ivry, at Marignan, and at Agincourt. The nobility serves the French nation by waging war. By war, the nobility has earned, at the price of its blood, the gold which decks its garments, the silver which covers its liveries. Do not, therefore, ask yourself, Olivier, how you serve the people, you who wield in your turn, and bravely too, the sword which has descended to you from your forefathers.”
“Madame!—Madame!” said the count, shaking his head, “do not speak so much of the blood of the nobility: the people, too, have blood in their veins; go and see it running in streams on the Place de la Bastille; go and count their dead, stretched out on the crimsoned pavement, and consider that their hearts, which now no longer beat, throbbed with a feeling as noble as that of a knight, on the day when your cannon were thundering against them; on the day when, seizing a new weapon in their unskilful hands, they sang in the midst of grapeshot,—a thing which even our bravest grenadiers do not always. Ah! Madame, my sovereign, look not on me, I entreat you, with that frowning eye. What is a grenadier? It is a gilt blue coat, covering the heart of which I was speaking to you a moment since. Of what importance is it to the bullet which pierces and kills, that the heart be covered with blue cloth or with a linen rag? Of what importance is it to the heart which is pierced through, whether the cuirass which protected it was cloth or canvas? The time is come to think of all that, Madame. You have no longer twenty-five millions of slaves in France; you have no longer twenty-five millions of subjects; you have no longer even twenty-five millions of men. You have twenty-five millions of soldiers.”