The Companions of Jehu - Alexandre Dumas (best biographies to read txt) 📗

where they buttoned above the calves, and pearl-gray silk stockings, striped transversely with the same green as the coat, and delicate pumps with diamond buckles. The inevitable eye-glass was not forgotten. As for the hat, it was precisely the same in which Carle Vernet painted his dandy of the Directory.

When these things were ready, Morgan waited with seeming impatience. At the end of five minutes he rang the bell. A waiter appeared.

“Hasn’t the wigmaker come?” asked Morgan.

In those days wigmakers were not yet called hair-dressers.

“Yes, citizen,” replied the waiter, “he came, but you had not yet returned, so he left word that he’d come back. Some one knocked just as you rang; it’s probably—”

“Here, here,” cried a voice on the stairs.

“Ah! bravo,” exclaimed Morgan. “Come in, Master Cadenette; you must make a sort of Adonis of me.”

“That won’t be difficult, Monsieur le Baron,” replied the wigmaker.

“Look here, look here; do you mean to compromise me, citizen Cadenette?”

“Monsieur le Baron, I entreat you, call me Cadenette; you’ll honor me by that proof of familiarity; but don’t call me citizen. Fie; that’s a revolutionary denomination! Even in the worst of the Terror I always called my wife Madame Cadenette. Now, excuse me for not waiting for you; but there’s a great ball in the Rue du Bac this evening, the ball of the Victims (the wigmaker emphasized this word). I should have thought that M. le Baron would be there.”

“Why,” cried Morgan, laughing; “so you are still a royalist, Cadenette?”

The wigmaker laid his hand tragically on his heart.

“Monsieur le Baron,” said he, “it is not only a matter of conscience, but a matter of state.”

“Conscience, I can understand that, Master Cadenette, but state! What the devil has the honorable guild of wigmakers to do with politics?”

“What, Monsieur le Baron?” said Cadenette, all the while getting ready to dress his client’s hair; “you ask me that? You, an aristocrat!”

“Hush, Cadenette!”

“Monsieur le Baron, we ci-devants can say that to each other.”

“So you are a ci-devant?”

“To the core! In what style shall I dress M. le Baron’s hair?”

“Dog’s ears, and tied up behind.”

“With a dash of powder?”

“Two, if you like, Cadenette.”

“Ah! monsieur, when one thinks that for five years I was the only man who had an atom of powder ‘à la maréchale.’ Why, Monsieur le Baron, a man was guillotined for owning a box of powder!”

“I’ve known people who were guillotined for less than that, Cadenette. But explain how you happen to be a ci-devant. I like to understand everything.”

“It’s very simple, Monsieur le Baron. You admit, don’t you, that among the guilds there were some that were more or less aristocratic.”

“Beyond doubt; accordingly as they were nearer to the higher classes of society.”

“That’s it, Monsieur le Baron. Well, we had the higher classes by the hair of their head. I, such as you see me, I have dressed Madame de Polignac’s hair; my father dressed Madame du Barry’s; my grandfather, Madame de Pompadour’s. We had our privileges, Monsieur; we carried swords. It is true, to avoid the accidents that were liable to crop up among hotheads like ourselves, our swords were usually of wood; but at any rate, if they were not the actual thing, they were very good imitations. Yes, Monsieur le Baron,” continued Cadenette with a sigh, “those days were the good days, not only for the wigmakers, but for all France. We were in all the secrets, all the intrigues; nothing was hidden from us. And there is no known instance, Monsieur le Baron, of a wigmaker betraying a secret. Just look at our poor queen; to whom did she trust her diamonds? To the great, the illustrious Leonard, the prince of wigmakers. Well, Monsieur le Baron, two men alone overthrew the scaffolding of a power that rested on the wigs of Louis XIV., the puffs of the Regency, the frizettes of Louis-XV., and the cushions of Marie Antoinette.”

“And those two men, those levellers, those two revolutionaries, who were they, Cadenette? that I may doom them, so far as it lies in my power, to public execration.”

“M. Rousseau and citizen Talma: Monsieur Rousseau who said that absurdity, ‘We must return to Nature,’ and citizen Talma, who invented the Titus headdress.”

“That’s true, Cadenette; that’s true.”

“When the Directory came in there was a moment’s hope. M. Barras never gave up powder, and citizen Moulins stuck to his queue. But, you see, the 18th Brumaire has knocked it all down; how could any one friz Bonaparte’s hair! Ah! there,” continued Cadenette, puffing out the dog’s ears of his client—“there’s aristocratic hair for you, soft and fine as silk, and takes the tongs so well one would think you wore a wig. See, Monsieur le Baron, you wanted to be as handsome as Adonis! Ah! if Venus had seen you, it’s not of Adonis that Mars would have been jealous!”

And Cadenette, now at the end of his labors and satisfied with the result, presented a hand-mirror to Morgan, who examined himself complacently.

“Come, come!” he said to the wigmaker, “you are certainly an artist, my dear fellow! Remember this style, for if ever they cut off my head I shall choose to have it dressed like that, for there will probably be women at my execution.”

“And M. le Baron wants them to regret him,” said the wigmaker gravely.

“Yes, and in the meantime, my dear Cadenette, here is a crown to reward your labors. Have the goodness to tell them below to call a carriage for me.”

Cadenette sighed.

“Monsieur le Baron,” said he, “time was when I should have answered: ‘Show yourself at court with your hair dressed like that, and I shall be paid.’ But there is no court now, Monsieur le Baron, and one must live. You shall have your carriage.”

With which Cadenette sighed again, slipped Morgan’s crown in his pocket, made the reverential bow of wigmakers and dancing-masters, and left the young man to complete his toilet.

The head being now dressed, the rest was soon done; the cravat alone took time, owing to the many failures that occurred; but Morgan concluded the difficult task with an experienced hand, and as eleven o’clock was striking he was ready to start. Cadenette had not forgotten his errand; a hackney-coach was at the door. Morgan jumped into it, calling out: “Rue du Bac, No. 60.”

The coach turned into the Rue de Grenelle, went up the Rue du Bac, and stopped at No. 60.

“Here’s a double fare, friend,” said Morgan, “on condition that you don’t stand before the door.”

The driver took the three francs and disappeared around the corner of the Rue de Varennes. Morgan glanced up the front of the house; it seemed as though he must be mistaken, so dark and silent was it. But he did not hesitate; he rapped in a peculiar fashion.

The door opened. At the further end of the courtyard was a building, brilliantly lighted. The young man went toward it, and, as he approached, the sound of instruments met his ear. He ascended a flight of stairs and entered the dressing-room. There he gave his cloak to the usher whose business it was to attend to the wraps.

“Here is your number,” said the usher. “As for your weapons, you are to place them in the gallery where you can find them easily.”

Morgan put the number in his trousers pocket, and entered the great gallery transformed into an arsenal. It contained a complete collection of arms of all kinds, pistols, muskets, carbines, swords, and daggers. As the ball might at any moment be invaded by the police, it was necessary that every dancer be prepared to turn defender at an instant’s notice. Laying his weapons aside, Morgan entered the ballroom.

We doubt if any pen could give the reader an adequate idea of the scene of that ball. Generally, as the name “Ball of the Victims” indicated, no one was admitted except by the strange right of having relatives who had either been sent to the scaffold by the Convention or the Commune of Paris, blown to pieces by Collot d’Herbois, or drowned by Carrier. As, however, the victims guillotined during the three years of the Terror far outnumbered the others, the dresses of the majority of those who were present were the clothes of the victims of the scaffold. Thus, most of the young girls, whose mothers and older sisters had fallen by the hands of the executioner, wore the same costume their mothers and sisters had worn for that last lugubrious ceremony; that is to say, a white gown and red shawl, with their hair cut short at the nape of the neck. Some added to this costume, already so characteristic, a detail that was even more significant; they knotted around their necks a thread of scarlet silk, fine as the blade of a razor, which, as in Faust’s Marguerite, at the Witches’ Sabbath, indicated the cut of the knife between the throat and the collar bone.

As for the men who were in the same case, they wore the collars of their coats turned down behind, those of their shirt wide open, their necks bare, and their hair, cut short.

But many had other rights of entrance to this ball besides that of having Victims in their families; some had made victims themselves. These latter were increasing. There were present men of forty or forty-five years of age, who had been trained in the boudoirs of the beautiful courtesans of the seventeenth century—who had known Madame du Barry in the attics of Versailles, Sophie Arnoult with M. de Lauraguais, La Duthé with the Comte d’Artois—who had borrowed from the courtesies of vice the polish with which they covered their ferocity. They were still young and handsome; they entered a salon, tossing their perfumed locks and their scented handkerchiefs; nor was it a useless precaution, for if the odor of musk or verbena had not masked it they would have smelled of blood.

There were men there twenty-five or thirty years old, dressed with extreme elegance, members of the association of Avengers, who seemed possessed with the mania of assassination, the lust of slaughter, the frenzy of blood, which no blood could quench—men who, when the order came to kill, killed all, friends or enemies; men who carried their business methods into the business of murder, giving their bloody checks for the heads of such or such Jacobins, and paying on sight.

There were younger men, eighteen and twenty, almost children, but children fed, like Achilles, on the marrow of wild beasts, like Pyrrhus, on the flesh of bears; here were the pupil-bandits of Schiller, the apprentice-judges of the Sainte-Vehme—that strange generation that follows great political convulsions, like the Titans after chaos, the hydras after the Deluge; as the vultures and crows follow the carnage.

Here was the spectre of iron impassible, implacable, inflexible, which men call Retaliation; and this spectre mingled with the guests. It entered the gilded salons; it signalled with a look, a gesture, a nod, and men followed where it led. It was, as says the author from whom we have borrowed these hitherto unknown but authentic details, “a merry lust for extermination.”

The Terror had affected great cynicism in clothes, a Spartan austerity in its food, the profound contempt of a barbarous people for arts and enjoyments. The Thermidorian reaction was, on the contrary, elegant, opulent, adorned; it exhausted all luxuries, all voluptuous pleasures, as in the days of Louis XV.; with one addition, the luxury of vengeance, the lust of blood.

Fréron’s name was given to the youth of the day, which was called the jeunesse Fréron, or the jéunesse dorée (gilded youth). Why Fréron? Why should he rather than others receive that strange and