The Hero of the People 5 – Williams · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
The Hero of the People 5The Candle Omen
18
Literature · Romance
The Hero of the People 5
The Candle Omen
WilliamsEnglish
In the meantime the Royal Family had continued their road to Paris. The pace was so slow and delayed that it was six o’clock before the carriage containing so much sorrow, hatred, passions and innocence, arrived at the city bars.
During the journey the Dauphin had complained of being hungry. There was no want of bread as many of the pikes and bayonets were holding up loaves and the Queen would have asked Gilbert to get one, if he had been by. She could not ask the mob, whom she held in horror.
“Wait till we are in the Tuileries Palace this evening,” she said, hugging the boy to her.
“But these men have plenty,” he protested.
“But that is theirs, not ours. And they went all the way to Versailles for it as there was none in Paris, these three days.”
“Have they not eaten for three days?” said the Prince. “Then they must be awful hungry, mamma.”
Etiquet ordered him to address his mother as Madam, but he was hungry as a poor boy and he called her mamma as a poor boy would his mother.
Ceasing to grieve, he tried to sleep. Poor royal babe, who would cry many times yet for bread before he died.
At the bars a halt was made, not to repose but to rejoice over the arrival. It was hailed with song and dance. A strange scene almost as terrifying in this joy as the others had been for ghastliness.
The fishmarket-women got off their horses, captured from the slain Lifeguardsmen, hanging their swords and carbines to the horns. Other women and the market-girls jumped off their cannon, which appeared in their alarming smoothness.
They all joined hands and danced around the royal carriage. Separating it from the deputies and the National Guard, an omen of what was to follow. This round dance had the good intention to set the enforced guests at ease: the men and women capered, kissed, hugged and sang together. The men lifted up their partners as in Teniers’ pictures.
This went on as night was falling, on a dark and rainy day, so that the dancing by the light of torches and the gun-stocks and fireworks, took fantastic effects of light and shade almost infernal.
After half an hour all shouted a general hurrah; all the firearms were shot off at risk of shooting somebody; and the bullets came down in the puddles with a sinister plash.
The prince and his sister wept; they were too frightened to feel hungered.
At the City Hall a line of troops prevented the crowd from entering the place. Here the Queen perceived her foster-brother, and confidential servant, Weber, an Austrian who had followed her fortunes from home, and was trying to pass the cordon and go in with her. To be more useful to the Queen he had put on a National Guard uniform and added the insignia of a staff-officer. The Royal Groom had lent him a horse. Not to excite suspicion he kept at a distance during the journey. Now he ran up at her call.
“What have you come for?” she demanded; “you will be useless here while at the Tuileries you will be needed. If you do not go on before, nothing will be ready for our accommodation.”
“Capital idea that,” said the King.
The Queen had spoken in German and the King had replied in English as he did not speak the other tongue though understanding it.
The bystanders held foreign tongues in horror, and they murmured and this swelled to a roar when the square opened and let the coach roll through.
The welcoming speech was made by Billy, Mayor of Paris, who played the King a scurvy trick by repeating his answer: “I always come with pleasure and confidence among my good people of Paris,” without the word “confidence” which spoilt matters, and he was taken to task by the Queen for it.
It was not till ten o’clock that the royal carriage got back to the Tuileries where Weber had done the best he could for them.
Count Provence had gone to Luxembourg Palace.
Weber had located the Royal Family in Countess Lamarck’s rooms, but the comforts were limited. For instance there was no room for Countess Charny at supper and she talked of spending the night in a chair for want of a bed. But knowing the great favor in which the Queen held the countess, they placed a couch for her in the next room to the Queen’s.
The latter shuddered at this for she thought of the count being with his wife, and Andrea saw the emotion.
“There must be some corner for me elsewhere,” said she; “I will go find it.”
“You are right, countess,” said the King while Marie Antoinette mumbled something unintelligible. “We will do something better to-morrow.”
The King watched the stately countess go out, while he held the plate to his mouth.
“That lady is a delightful creature,” he said, “and Charny ought to be happy to find such a phoenix at court.”
The Queen leant back in her chair to hide her sensation, not from the speaker, but from his sister Elizabeth, who was frightened lest she had fallen ill.
The Queen did not breathe at ease till alone in her room.
She had heard her daughter say her prayers, speaking a little longer than usual as she was pleading for her brother who had gone to rest forgetting to say his.
Sitting alone at a table, somehow she had the panorama of her life pass before her.
She recalled that she was born on the second of November, 1755, the day of the Lisbon earthquake, which swallowed up fifty thousand souls and extended five thousand miles.
She recalled that the room she slept in, in France, at Strasburg, represented the Massacre of the Innocents and so frightened her in the flickering lamplight that she had always retained a terrible memory of her first night on French soil.
She recalled how, stopping at Taverney House, she had been shown in the gardens by Baron Balsamo the image of an unknown instrument for decapitation: this was the man who, under the name of Cagliostro, had exercised a fatal influence on her destiny, as witness his hand in the Queen’s Necklace trial; though she was advised that he had perished in the papal dungeons as a magician and atheist, had she not seen him this day in the mob during the halt at Sevres?
She recalled that in Madam Lebrun’s portrait she had unwittingly made her pose as the unfortunate Henrietta Maria of England, in her portrait, as Wife of Charles I. the Beheaded.
She recalled how, when she got out of her coach for the first time at Versailles, in that Marble Court where so much blood lately flowed on her behalf, a lightning stroke had flashed so extraordinarily that Marshal Richelieu had said: “An evil omen!” albeit he was a cynic not easily startled by superstition.
She was recalling all this when a reddish cloud, from her eyes being strained, thickened around her, and one of the four candles in the candelabrum went out without evident cause.
While she was looking at it, still smoking, it seemed to her that the next taper to it paled sensibly, and turning red and then blue in the flame, faded away and lengthened upward, as if to quit the wick, from which it leaped altogether. It was extinguished, as though by an unseen breath from below.
She had watched the death of this with haggard eyes and panting bosom, and her hands went out towards the candlestick proportionable to the eclipse. When gone out, she closed her eyes, drew back in her armchair, and ran her hand over her forehead, streaming with perspiration.
When she opened them anew, after ten minutes, she perceived that the flame of the third candle was affected like the rest.
She believed it was a dream or that she was under some hallucination. She tried to rise but seemed nailed to her chair. She wanted to call her daughter, whom she would not have aroused a few minutes before for a second crown, but her voice died away in her throat. She tried to turn her head but it was rigid as if the third light expiring attracted her eyes and breath. Like the other pair, it changed hue and swaying to one side and the other, finally shot itself out.
Then fear had such mastery that speech returned to her and that made her feel restored in courage.
“I am not going to distress myself because three candles happened to go out,” she said; “but if the fourth suffers the same fate, then woe is me!”
Suddenly, without going through the transitions of the others, without lengthening or fluttering to left or right as if the death-angel wing had wafted it, the fourth flame went out.
She screamed with terror, rose, reeled and fell to the floor.
At this appeal the door opened and Andrea, white and silent in her night-wrapper appeared like a ghost on the sill. When she had revived her mistress with the mechanical action of one impelled by sheer duty, the Queen remembered all the presage, and aware that it was a woman beside her, flung her arms round her neck, and cried:
“Save me, defend me!”
“Your Majesty needs no defense among her friends,” said Andrea, “and you appear free of the swoon in which you fell.”
“Countess Charny,” gasped the other, letting go of her whom she had embraced, and almost repelling her in the first impulse.
Neither the feeling nor the expression had escaped the lady. But she remained motionless to impassibility.
“I shall undress alone,” faltered the Queen. “Return to your room, as you must require sleep.”
“I shall go back, not to sleep but to watch over your Majesty’s slumber,” returned Andrea, respectfully curtseying to the other and stalking away with the solemn step of a vitalized statue.
