The Sword of Honor Part 69

"He is growing up under the eye of the Lord. He is in Rome, attending the seminary of our Society."

The financier conducted Father Morlet to the door of the cabinet, and then rang for the valet to show in Monsieur Lebrenn at once.

"What can be the motive of my nephew's coming now to Paris?" pondered Hubert. "I hope he bears no bad news from my poor sister. Her last letters foreshadowed nothing untoward. Ah, here he is. Welcome, my dear nephew," he cried as he held out his hand, "welcome! And first of all put me at ease about my sister and niece. Are they well?"

"Charlotte and her mother are in perfect health," answered Lebrenn.

"They charged me to visit you and tell you so, and I have made it a point to deliver the message the very day of my arrival. We are living happily in the peaceful town of Vannes, and still occupied in our cloth trade."

"From which I conclude that you no longer trouble yourself with politics. I congratulate you upon your wisdom, my dear nephew. The Republic is a chimera, as I said long ago. Look at it to-day, as good as dead, and to-morrow it will have heaved its last sigh. You come just in time to attend the funeral. May it never rise from its ashes."

"The Republic is like Lazarus in the Scriptures. It may be wrapped in its shroud, it will burst the stones of its sepulture. But let us leave politics aside; we are not agreed on the matter, and never will be. I am asked by my wife and her mother to inquire of you after the health of my father-in-law, your colleague in the Council of Ancients, of whom we have no news."

"My brother-in-law is still the same, dragging his miserable life from apostasy to apostasy, tormented by the fear of death."

"What an existence!"

"He is, indeed, the most cowardly of men, and at the same time the most talkative and vain of lawyers. Then, his position of Representative of the people in the Convention, and now as deputy in the Council of Ancients, flatters his vanity, and furnishes him with the opportunity to give a loose to his voluble oratory. So, tossed back and forth between his vanity, which impels him toward the hazards of political life, just now so tempestuous, and his cowardice, which makes him tremble each day lest he receive the reward of his apostasies, the miserable fellow's life is kept, as the Catholics say, in perpetual h.e.l.l."

"Monsieur Desmarais!" announced the valet.

The lawyer, barely across the threshold, stopped stock still, as surprised as put out of sorts by the unexpected presence of his son-in-law; for a moment he was unable to utter a word, and Hubert said to him sardonically:

"How, brother! Is it so that you greet your son-in-law after so many years' separation?"

"Monsieur Lebrenn should know," at length replied the lawyer, regaining his self-a.s.surance, "that a deep gulf separates honest men from the Jacobins of '93, the Septembrists, Terrorists, Communists, and other Socialists."

"Citizen Desmarais, we have known each other a long time," retorted Lebrenn. "You are the father of my dear wife, to whom my life owes its happiness. Whatever may be your words or your conduct toward me, there are limits which I shall never exceed in my treatment of you. You inspire me neither with anger nor hatred, but with a profound pity, for you are unhappy."

"What insolence! To hear such words issue from the lips of my daughter's husband, and be unable to punish him for them!"

"My pity for you is very natural," continued Lebrenn. "I pity your condition because you must feel a cruel chagrin at being separated from your wife and daughter."

"Scurrilous fellow!" bellowed the attorney, unable to contain himself.

"It is you who came to sow trouble and discord between the members of my family and me."

"Citizen Desmarais, you are arrived at the decline of life; your solitude weighs upon you. You regret, you regret each day anew the sweets of the domestic hearth; our home is and always will be open to you. Renounce your life in politics, the incessant source of your anguish and your alarms, because of your lack of steadfastness. Return to your wife and daughter; they will forget the past. But when fear has its clutch upon you, you are like a person out of his mind; though you may be in perfect safety, yet you will perish anyhow. So then, when you please, Citizen Desmarais, you will find a place at our fireside. You will enjoy with us an existence as peaceful and happy as your present one is tortured."

Then to Hubert he added:

"Adieu, citizen. I shall return before my departure, to get your messages for Vannes."

"Adieu, dear nephew," answered the latter. "Although a Jacobin, you have my esteem."

CHAPTER IV.

LAYING THE TRAIN.

Late that afternoon conspiracy held high carnival in the parlor of Lahary, an influential member of the Council of Ancients. The conspirators present were scattered in groups about the apartment, engaged in lively conversation, when Hubert the banker and advocate Desmarais made their entrance upon the scene.

"Messieurs," Lahary was saying, "there are a number of us present. Let us begin our deliberations. I shall preside. Our colleague Regnier has the floor."

Regnier at once began: "Gentlemen, yesterday, in a long conference held at the home of our friend the president of the Council of Ancients, various opinions were advanced and discussed, but we separated without having reached any conclusion, setting to-day for the final deliberation. We should no longer temporize. Time presses; public opinion, very uneasy, very restless, is watching; it apprehends a coup d'etat, they say, from moment to moment. This state of mind is particularly favorable to our projects, only we must make speed to profit by circ.u.mstances, and hasten events. Else the Council of Five Hundred will steal a march on us and appeal to an insurrection, in the name of the Const.i.tution in danger. We should thus lose much of our vantage ground."

"Aye, let us haste," agreed Fouche. "Trust to my long experience. In revolutions, he who attacks has three chances to one."

"The experience and authority of our friend Fouche in matters of conspiracy can not be too highly estimated," Regnier hastened to put in.

"I am for attacking, and that to-morrow, the 18th Brumaire. Here is my project. The Council of Five Hundred is the only real obstacle to the overthrow of the Const.i.tution, which, it is decided, shall give way to another form of government, to be determined on later. The Council of Five Hundred, composed in its immense majority of republicans, is, then, the stumbling block to our projects. It must be either suppressed or annihilated."

"It is more than probable that the canaille of the suburbs will not budge an inch. Nevertheless, let us proceed prudently, as if an insurrection were really to be feared. Let us get all the police, horse and foot, upon the field to repress all suggestion of revolt," advised Fouche.

"To conjure away the peril of an insurrection, this is what I would propose," Regnier continued. "The Const.i.tution of the year III vests exclusively in us, the Council of Ancients, the right to appoint or change the meeting-place of the a.s.semblies. Let us, in virtue of our const.i.tutional right, transfer our seat and that of the Five Hundred to St. Cloud, which we can invest with five or six thousand troops, of which we will give the command to General Bonaparte. Things thus prepared, if the Council of Five Hundred refuses to adhere to our most drastic measures--a refusal who can doubt?--we shall p.r.o.nounce the dissolution of their Council, and commission General Bonaparte to carry out the decree. Triumph is a.s.sured--"

"I am authorized by my brother," spoke up a new party to the debate, Lucien Bonaparte, "to declare to you that if he is placed in supreme command of the troops he will answer for everything, even to the burning of Paris."

"Those are extreme measures, but we must not recoil before them. We may have to burn Paris," chimed in the plotters in chorus.

"Yes, I share the opinion of my colleagues," declared Desmarais the lawyer. "The Council of Five Hundred, transferred to St. Cloud, becomes no longer an object of fear. But how can we justify that relegation in the eyes of the public?"

Fouche smiled sardonically. "Citizen Brutus Desmarais," said he, "you have forgotten the fifty thousand Septembrists who are in the catacombs!

My spies and my horse police will spread themselves all over Paris to-morrow trumpeting to the good bourgeois that a tremendous plot has been unearthed to-night by Monsieur Fouche, Minister of Police. He, wis.h.i.+ng to frustrate the abominable projects of the scoundrels of Terrorists, who are in league with the Five Hundred, all Jacobins, warned the Council of Ancients of what was on foot; and the n.o.ble conscript fathers, who would be the first to perish under the daggers of the bloodthirsty Terrorists, thereupon decided to remove the sessions of the national representation to St. Cloud."

"Hurrah for the great complot!" shouted Lemercier, opening his mouth for the first time. "And this reason can well be supported by another, by insisting above all that the lives of the Council of Ancients are menaced by their sitting any longer in Paris."

"Yes, yes--on with the 'great conspiracy'!" cried all.

"It is agreed, then," summed up Regnier, "that the discovery of this plot--excellent invention of the police!--is to justify the removal to St. Cloud. Now we must see that our project does not miss fire."

"For that purpose we must call a special session of our colleagues of the Council of Ancients, without informing them of the reason therefor,"

suggested Lemercier.

"I would observe to my honorable colleague, that, to my mind, it would be a very prudent move not to notify the republican minority which sits with us in the Council. These fellows would ask the most indiscreet questions, the most absurd, ridiculous questions. They wouldn't content themselves with the simple affirmation that there was a plot discovered; they would ask for proofs of the plot! And the details of its discovery!

It would be most difficult to answer them!" put in Desmarais.

"Desmarais is right," a.s.sented Cornet, another of the conspirators. "My belief is that all of us here present should charge ourselves to go this evening to see our colleagues of the majority personally, let them know the reason for to-morrow morning's extraordinary session, and address letters of notification to them alone. Treason all along the line--our success depends upon it. Is my advice taken?"

"If the republican minority complains about not being notified, we can blame the inspectors of the hall," ventured Lemercier.

"It will be necessary, as a matter of precaution, to double the troops about the Council of Ancients," Lucien Bonaparte advised. "Everything must be foreseen. Squads of police agents should even be mixed with them."

"General Bonaparte, more than anyone else, will serve our ends,"

answered Regnier. "We shall count on General Bonaparte; say to him that he may count on us."

"Ah, there, Lucien," said Fouche with his withered leer, "if your brother orders the troops to march, how will you, as president of the Fire Hundred, whom you betray with such neatness and despatch, keep those prattlers from screeching like jays when they are dissolved?"

"I shall head off the storm, never fear," laughed Lucien.