The tone of it brought him up short. He turned again, Le Chapelier with him.
"I said M. de La Tour d"Azyr."
"What has he to do with the proposal you were making me?"
"He? Why, he is the phlebotomist in chief."
And Le Chapelier added. "It is he who killed Lagron."
"Not a friend of yours, is he?" wondered Danton.
"And it is La Tour d"Azyr you desire me to kill?" asked Andre-Louis very slowly, after the manner of one whose thoughts are meanwhile pondering the subject.
"That"s it," said Danton. "And not a job for a prentice hand, I can a.s.sure you."
"Ah, but this alters things," said Andre-Louis, thinking aloud. "It offers a great temptation."
"Why, then...?" The Colossus took a step towards him again.
"Wait!" He put up his hand. Then with chin sunk on his breast, he paced away to the window, musing.
Le Chapelier and Danton exchanged glances, then watched him, waiting, what time he considered.
At first he almost wondered why he should not of his own accord have decided upon some such course as this to settle that long-standing account of M. de La Tour d"Azyr. What was the use of this great skill in fence that he had come to acquire, unless he could turn it to account to avenge Vilmorin, and to make Aline safe from the lure of her own ambition? It would be an easy thing to seek out La Tour d"Azyr, put a mortal affront upon him, and thus bring him to the point. To-day this would be murder, murder as treacherous as that which La Tour d"Azyr had done upon Philippe de Vilmorin; for to-day the old positions were reversed, and it was Andre-Louis who might go to such an a.s.signation without a doubt of the issue. It was a moral obstacle of which he made short work. But there remained the legal obstacle he had expounded to Danton. There was still a law in France; the same law which he had found it impossible to move against La Tour d"Azyr, but which would move briskly enough against himself in like case. And then, suddenly, as if by inspiration, he saw the way--a way which if adopted would probably bring La Tour d"Azyr to a poetic justice, bring him, insolent, confident, to thrust himself upon Andre-Louis" sword, with all the odium of provocation on his own side.
He turned to them again, and they saw that he was very pale, that his great dark eyes glowed oddly.
"There will probably be some difficulty in finding a suppleant for this poor Lagron," he said. "Our fellow-countrymen will be none so eager to offer themselves to the swords of Privilege."
"True enough," said Le Chapelier gloomily; and then, as if suddenly leaping to the thing in Andre-Louis" mind: "Andre!" he cried. "Would you..."
"It is what I was considering. It would give me a legitimate place in the a.s.sembly. If your Tour d"Azyrs choose to seek me out then, why, their blood be upon their own heads. I shall certainly do nothing to discourage them." He smiled curiously. "I am just a rascal who tries to be honest--Scaramouche always, in fact; a creature of sophistries. Do you think that Ancenis would have me for its representative?"
"Will it have Omnes Omnibus for its representative?" Le Chapelier was laughing, his countenance eager. "Ancenis will be convulsed with pride.
It is not Rennes or Nantes, as it might have been had you wished it. But it gives you a voice for Brittany."
"I should have to go to Ancenis..."
"No need at all. A letter from me to the Munic.i.p.ality, and the Munic.i.p.ality will confirm you at once. No need to move from here. In a fortnight at most the thing can be accomplished. It is settled, then?"
Andre-Louis considered yet a moment. There was his academy. But he could make arrangements with Le Duc and Galoche to carry it on for him whilst himself directing and advising. Le Duc, after all, was become a thoroughly efficient master, and he was a trustworthy fellow. At need a third a.s.sistant could be engaged.
"Be it so," he said at last.
Le Chapelier clasped hands with him and became congratulatorily voluble, until interrupted by the red-coated giant at the door.
"What exactly does it mean to our business, anyway?" he asked. "Does it mean that when you are a representative you will not scruple to skewer M. le Marquis?"
"If M. le Marquis should offer himself to be skewered, as he no doubt will."
"I perceive the distinction," said M. Danton, and sneered. "You"ve an ingenious mind." He turned to Le Chapelier. "What did you say he was to begin with--a lawyer, wasn"t it?"
"Yes, I was a lawyer, and afterwards a mountebank."
"And this is the result!"
"As you say. And do you know that we are after all not so dissimilar, you and I?"
"What?"
"Once like you I went about inciting other people to go and kill the man I wanted dead. You"ll say I was a coward, of course."
Le Chapelier prepared to slip between them as the clouds gathered on the giant"s brow. Then these were dispelled again, and the great laugh vibrated through the long room.
"You"ve touched me for the second time, and in the same place. Oh, you can fence, my lad. We should be friends. Rue des Cordeliers is my address. Any--scoundrel will tell you where Danton lodges. Desmoulins lives underneath. Come and visit us one evening. There"s always a bottle for a friend."
CHAPTER VII. THE SPADa.s.sINICIDES
After an absence of rather more than a week, M. le Marquis de La Tour d"Azyr was back in his place on the Cote Droit of the National a.s.sembly.
Properly speaking, we should already at this date allude to him as the ci-devant Marquis de La Tour d"Azyr, for the time was September of 1790, two months after the pa.s.sing--on the motion of that downright Breton leveller, Le Chapelier--of the decree that n.o.bility should no more be hereditary than infamy; that just as the brand of the gallows must not defile the possibly worthy descendants of one who had been convicted of evil, neither should the blazon advertising achievement glorify the possibly unworthy descendants of one who had proved himself good. And so the decree had been pa.s.sed abolishing hereditary n.o.bility and consigning family escutcheons to the rubbish-heap of things no longer to be tolerated by an enlightened generation of philosophers. M. le Comte de Lafayette, who had supported the motion, left the a.s.sembly as plain M.
Motier, the great tribune Count Mirabeau became plain M. Riquetti, and M. le Marquis de La Tour d"Azyr just simple M. Lesarques. The thing was done in one of those exaltations produced by the approach of the great National Festival of the Champ de Mars, and no doubt it was thoroughly repented on the morrow by those who had lent themselves to it. Thus, although law by now, it was a law that no one troubled just yet to enforce.
That, however, is by the way. The time, as I have said, was September, the day dull and showery, and some of the damp and gloom of it seemed to have penetrated the long Hall of the Manege, where on their eight rows of green benches elliptically arranged in ascending tiers about the s.p.a.ce known as La Piste, sat some eight or nine hundred of the representatives of the three orders that composed the nation.
The matter under debate by the const.i.tution-builders was whether the deliberating body to succeed the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly should work in conjunction with the King, whether it should be periodic or permanent, whether it should govern by two chambers or by one.
The Abbe Maury, son of a cobbler, and therefore in these days of ant.i.theses orator-in-chief of the party of the Right--the Blacks, as those who fought Privilege"s losing battles were known--was in the tribune. He appeared to be urging the adoption of a two-chambers system framed on the English model. He was, if anything, more long-winded and prosy even than his habit; his arguments a.s.sumed more and more the form of a sermon; the tribune of the National a.s.sembly became more and more like a pulpit; but the members, conversely, less and less like a congregation. They grew restive under that steady flow of pompous verbiage, and it was in vain that the four ushers in black satin breeches and carefully powdered heads, chain of office on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, gilded sword at their sides, circulated in the Piste, clapping their hands, and hissing,
"Silence! En place!"
Equally vain was the intermittent ringing of the bell by the president at his green-covered table facing the tribune. The Abbe Maury had talked too long, and for some time had failed to interest the members.
Realizing it at last, he ceased, whereupon the hum of conversation became general. And then it fell abruptly. There was a silence of expectancy, and a turning of heads, a craning of necks. Even the group of secretaries at the round table below the president"s dais roused themselves from their usual apathy to consider this young man who was mounting the tribune of the a.s.sembly for the first time.
"M. Andre-Louis Moreau, deputy suppleant, vice Emmanuel Lagron, deceased, for Ancenis in the Department of the Loire."
M. de La Tour d"Azyr shook himself out of the gloomy abstraction in which he had sat. The successor of the deputy he had slain must, in any event, be an object of grim interest to him. You conceive how that interest was heightened when he heard him named, when, looking across, he recognized indeed in this Andre-Louis Moreau the young scoundrel who was continually crossing his path, continually exerting against him a deep-moving, sinister influence to make him regret that he should have spared his life that day at Gavrillac two years ago. That he should thus have stepped into the shoes of Lagron seemed to M. de La Tour d"Azyr too apt for mere coincidence, a direct challenge in itself.
He looked at the young man in wonder rather than in anger, and looking at him he was filled by a vague, almost a premonitory, uneasiness.
At the very outset, the presence which in itself he conceived to be a challenge was to demonstrate itself for this in no equivocal terms.
"I come before you," Andre-Louis began, "as a deputy-suppleant to fill the place of one who was murdered some three weeks ago."
It was a challenging opening that instantly provoked an indignant outcry from the Blacks. Andre-Louis paused, and looked at them, smiling a little, a singularly self-confident young man.