The Quest of Glory - Marjorie Bowen (most interesting books to read txt) 📗
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politics.”
The powerful eyes of M. de Voltaire narrowed and glittered.
“You know what the politics of France are? You know what kind of a world
this Paris is?”
Luc drew a deep breath; he thought of Carola, of M. de Richelieu, of the
young suicide of Versailles.
“Monsieur,” he replied earnestly, “my life has been passed in a kind of
seclusion, I being always with the army and often abroad, and I have had
little time even for meditation, and in truth I might well be engulfed
in this great world of which I know so little, and where I have already
experienced some falls, were it not that I have certain thoughts, ideals
so fixed that I cannot conceive them altering, and so I must go on.”
“Ah!” cried M. de Voltaire softly, “you will succeed; but not in the way
you think perhaps. Politics are poor scope after all.”
“Yet you are in them, Monsieur.”
“As I was in the Bastille!” flashed M. de Voltaire, “as I have been
everything and said everything and deceived them all—all the little
dolls who dance to whatever tune is played the loudest. I have been many
characters, I have laughed at all France, and now I am—Voltaire! And
all France steps to the pace I set—therefore I know something of kings
and queens and courtiers and beggars.” He paused and smiled, laying his
hand on his heart with a quick, passionate gesture. “I have tried most
weapons,” he continued, “and the pen is the most powerful of all.
Monseigneur, you have thought, you can express yourself—use your pen to
lift yourself above the age—write—write from your soul, never heed what
you know—write what you feel!”
Luc caught his breath.
“Monsieur—do you mean that I should write and—publish?”
Luc flushed. Instinct, training, tradition were too powerful for even M.
de Voltaire’s fiery urgings to move. Though he struggled against the
impression he felt as if he had been insulted; then he laughed, and the
great man before whom he had stood abashed was swept with that laugh on
to a different plane. In the next perfectly courteous words that Luc
spoke, it was the Marquis addressing the attorney’s clerk.
“But, Monsieur, I am a gentleman,” he said simply. M. de Voltaire looked
at him for a moment of silence. “Would you rather be such as M. de
Richelieu or such as I?” he asked at last.
Luc did not see the point.
“M. de Richelieu does nothing that a gentleman may not do,” he answered;
“he does not write books.”
“No—and he has all the seven deadly sins to his credit, which, I
suppose, makes a fine patent of nobility,” remarked M. de Voltaire
slowly.
Luc flushed; he found that it was necessary to explain.
“When one is ‘born’ there are things one cannot do, Monsieur. I could no
more publish my writings than—” he hesitated for an illustration—“than
a stage player could wear a sword.”
M. de Voltaire was very pale; his whole figure trembled.
“Monsieur le Marquis!” he said in a terrible voice, “you have ambitions,
you have desires, you have your soul to satisfy, you are searching for
glory—I do not doubt that you have in fancy scaled the highest peak of
achievement—and all the while you are bound and gagged and tied to
earth because you are born a gentleman. Are not your eyes open on the
changes about you? Do you not see that we—that I—are sweeping away God
and rank and all the barriers that come between man and man? You are
young, Monsieur le Marquis; you may live to see the day when kings are
cast down and peasants are called to the government of their country.
This is the age of light and freedom; your rank is but a clog to
you—your genius might raise you to be a light over France!”
He spoke with such force, passion, such energy of gesture and emphasis
that Luc had the sense that something new was being violently disclosed
to his view. He sank into the chair before the desk and fixed his eyes,
dark with emotion, on the extraordinary animated face of the speaker. He
had nothing to say; his own instincts, that were until then
unquestioned, taken for granted, never put into words, were unchanged,
for they were rooted almost as deeply as life itself.
“Go your way,” said M. de Voltaire more quietly—“spend your strength
for another ten years in politics as you have in war—give your talents
to the service of the superstitious young profligate who sleeps on the
throne of thrones.”
“Monsieur!” cried Luc, “do you speak of the King?”
“Of His Most Christian Majesty,” replied M. de Voltaire, “of Louis de
Bourbon, who is always on his knees to a certain Jesus Christ or a
certain Marquise de Pompadour, the lady who rules France and who is my
very good friend.”
“The King is the King,” answered Luc, reddening, “and I serve him.”
“If you have rejected their Christian God, why do you not reject their
Christian King?” demanded M. de Voltaire. “Make your court to the lady I
mention; she has great good sense. Use these things, bow down to them,
make your way through them, but do not believe in them.”
“I believe in the King,” returned Luc, in a tone of great agitation. “I
must believe in him whom I have seen hundreds die for.”
“Hundreds of thousands have died for Christ,” flashed M. de
Voltaire—“do you therefore believe in Him?”
“No,” answered Luc; “but I know there is a God, and I love not to talk
of these matters. As for His Majesty—if I did not believe in him could
I serve him?”
“Serve France,” interrupted M. de Voltaire. “Put aside all prejudice,
superstition, your rank, your family, come to Paris, go into a
garret—be one of us—start as I started—be free, express your own
soul, write your thoughts, and laugh at the world!”
Luc looked at him with steady hazel eyes, then shook his head.
“I cannot,” he said, in firm, positive tones and with a faint smile.
Luc was no more moved from his way by M. de Voltaire’s impetuous entry
into his life than he had been by the unveiling of Carola or by the
glimpse he had of the frivolous, cynical Court.
M. de Voltaire was alive, vivid, great. Luc admired him almost to
adoration for his intellect and his courage, but he did not in the least
waver from the plain path he had set himself, nor did the words of the
fiery philosopher affect his scheme of life.
He was going along the way prescribed by tradition, by his instinct, by
his birth. He was a noble, a soldier; he owed allegiance to the King,
respect to his father, reverence to his name and blazon. That he could
not believe in the dogma of the Church was no reason for him to
disbelieve in loyalty and honour.
Certainly he had wished to be free, but had always rejected the thought
as a temptation; and to give up his rank, his family, his noble
ambitions to devote himself to literature seemed to him pure sacrilege.
He did not even dwell on the suggestion long, but dismissed it as an
impossibility.
If the King were nothing in himself—well, he was a symbol, and Luc,
with the obstinacy of the idealist, refused to believe that the world
was what the caustic vision of M. de Voltaire saw it.
When the first excitement of the great man’s visit was over, Luc
returned to his old serenity, went to his desk, and wrote another letter
to M. Amelot. Whatever the Court was, it was a vehicle. He had never
supposed that he could attain his goal without stepping through some
mud; there were only two ways open to a man of rank—the army and the
Court.
“Unless,” thought Luc, “the heavens open to direct me I will tread the
way my father trod.”
He had parted from M. de Voltaire with friendly courteousness on each
side, based on real liking and admiration. Luc had been inspired and the
older man piqued by the interview; it had ended on a mutual laugh and a
promise of future intercourse. The Marquis in no way abated his homage
of M. de Voltaire, who, on his side, had taken a sudden liking for the
young soldier.
That evening a letter arrived from Aix. The old Marquis spoke out at
last: Would Luc return home and marry Clémence de Séguy? Her father was
more than willing, she was a good girl of rank and qualities, a match
for the honour of the house, in every way suitable. Might not he
formally request her hand?
Luc put the letter down and set his lips. He had just decided to hug his
chains, to be loyal to every tie, to fulfil every duty, to take up the
life his ancestors had led—therefore he had no excuse to refuse this
match, and Clémence shone brightly beside the tarnished image of Carola.
He wrote immediately saying that if he obtained an appointment, or the
sure promise of one, he would return to Aix to marry Mile de Séguy, and
as he sealed the letter he felt like a man who has made his own decision
irrevocable. The suggestion was not unexpected; but even yesterday he
would not have been sure of his answer. Now M. de Voltaire’s bold speech
had shown him clearly enough his own mind.
Later that day, when his letters were dispatched, he left the house and
walked up and down the pleasant quays by the river, possessed by a great
sense of peace and exaltation. It had been a day overbrimming with
sunshine, and now, in the hour of twilight, there was a soft glow left
over water, trees, buildings, and sky—a reflection of light; rosy,
clear, tender, and melancholy.
Luc passed by M. de Voltaire’s house near the Rue Bréa, and walked
slowly on towards the island of the city and the great church of
Notre-Dame de Paris with her two mighty towers. Here the houses began to
get poorer and meaner, there were more beggars and fewer sedan-chairs,
the shops were more frequent and dirty, the churches looked neglected.
Luc paused to lean over the narrow wall of the embankment and look at
the great river that widened here to divide into the arms that clasped
the island and the church. The water swirled, deep and ruddy coloured
from the last glow of the sun, round the piles of the bridge that led to
the splendid porch of Notre-Dame; beyond the darkening pile of the
church it rolled in a silver-grey flood between flat banks and isolated
groups of buildings now beginning to show black against the paling sky.
Luc was lost in deep, sweet, and nameless thoughts when he was roused by
the practised whine of beggary loud and insistent in his ear.
He turned to see a creature in the most miserable attire thrusting out a
trembling, grasping hand for charity.
Luc started, for the face of this being was so broken, tortured,
disfigured (almost beyond likeness to humanity) by the most violent
ravages of smallpox that it seemed more some kind of sad-beaten ape than
a man.
The monotonous demand for money continued to issue from the bloodless
lips; the half-blind eyes winked and peered at Luc with a stifled
appeal. The Marquis pulled out his purse and gave the fellow a silver
coin in silence, his delicate senses revolted beyond expression at the
nearness of the wretched creature.
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