Back Aa

Taking the Bastile

<h2>CHAPTER XXI.</h2> THE QUEEN AND HER MASTER. Andrea's confession was a long one for it was not until eleven at night that the royal boudoir door opened, and on the sill was seen the Countess of Charny, kissing her mistress's hand. She went away with weeping eyes but the Queen's were scorching, as she paced her room. She gave order that she was to be disturbed on no account unless for news from Paris. [Pg 157] At the supposition that Charny had at last perceived that his wife was still young and fair, the Queen found that misfortune is nothing to a heart-chagrin. But in the midst of her feverish torment came the cruel consolation. According to Andrea's confession she had been wronged in a mesmeric trance and Gilbert had humbled her pride forever. Somewhere was the visible token of her defeat—like a trophy of his shameful triumph, the young man had borne away in the wintry night the offspring of the occult love of the gardener's boy for his suzerain's daughter! She could not but be wonderstricken at the magical combination of wayward fortune, by which a peasant lad had been made to love the fine lady who was to be the favorite of the Queen of France. "So the grain of dust has been lifted up to glitter like the diamond in the lustre of the skies," she mused. Was not this lowborn lover the living symbol of what was happening at the time, a man of the people swaying the politics of a great empire, one who personified, by privilege of the evil spirit who soared over France, the insult to its nobility and the attack on royalty by the plebeians? While shuddering, she wanted to look upon this monster who by a crime had infused his base blood into the aristocratic blue: who had caused a Revolution that he should be delivered from the castle; it was his principles which had armed Billet, Gonchon, Marat, and the others. He was a venomous creature and terrible; for he had ruined Andrea as her lover and wrecked the Bastile as the hater of kings. She ought to know him to avoid him or the better to fight him. Better still to make use of him. At any price she must see him and judge him. Two thirds of the night were passed in reverie before she sank into troubled slumber. But even here the Revolution was her nightmare. She had a dream that she was walking in one of her German forests when a gnome seized her from behind a tree and she knew that it was Gilbert. She shrieked and, waking, found Lady Tourzel, an attendant, by her pillow. [Pg 158] "The Queen is sick," she called out. "Fetch the doctor." "What doctor is in waiting?" asked the Queen. "Dr. Gilbert, the new honorary physician whom the King has appointed." "You speak as if you knew him, and yet he has only been a week in this country from America, and only a day out of the Bastile?" "Your Majesty, I read his writings, and I was so curious to see the author," said the lady, "that I had him pointed out to me as he was in his rooms." "Ah! well, let him begin his duties. Tell him I am ailing and request his presence." Surprised and profoundly affected, though he seemed but a little uneasy, Gilbert appeared before the Queen. With her aristocratic intelligence she read that he felt timid respect for the woman, tranquil audacity for the patient and no emotion whatever for the sovereign. She was vexed, too, that he could look so well in the black suit worn by the third class of society and one the Revolutionists chose. The less provoking he was in bearing, the more her anger grew. She had fancied the man an odious character, one of the heroes of impudence whom she had often seen around her. She had represented as a Mirabeau, the man she hated next to Cardinal Rohan and General Lafayette, this author of Andrea's woes. He was guilty in her eyes for looking the gentleman. The proud Austrian conceived a wild hatred against one whom she thought had stolen the semblance of the rank he had no business to aspire to. As he had not ceased to look at her while she was dismissing all her ladies, his persistency exasperated her like importunity. "Well, sir," she snapped at him like a pistol-shot, "what are you doing in staring at me instead of telling what ails me?" This furious apostrophe, accompanied with visual lightning, would have blasted any courtier into dropping at her feet and sueing for mercy though he was a hero, a marshal, or a demigod. But Gilbert made answer quietly: [Pg 159] "The physician judges by the eyes in the first place, my lady. As your Majesty summoned me, I come not from idle curiosity but to obey your orders and fulfill my duty. As far as in my power lays, I study your Majesty." "Am I sick?" "Not in the usual meaning of the word, but your Majesty is superexcited." "Why not say I am out of temper?" she queried with irony. "Allow me to use the medical term, since I am a medical man called in." "Be it so. Whence this superexcitement?" "Your Majesty is too intelligent not to know that a man of medicine only judges the material state: he is not a wizard to sound at the first glance the mind of man." "Do you mean to imply that at the second, or third time, you could not merely tell me my bodily ail but a mental one?" "Possibly," returned Gilbert coldly. She darted at him a withering look while he was simply staring at her with desperate fixedness. Vanquished, she tried to wrench herself away from what was alarming while fascinating, and she upset a stand so that a chocolate cup was smashed on the floor. He saw it fall and the cup shiver, but did not budge. The color flew to her brow, to which she carried her chilly hand; but she dared not direct her eyes again on the magnetizer. "Under what master did you study?" she inquired, using a scornful tone more painful than insolence. "I cannot answer without wounding your Majesty." The Queen felt that he gave her an advantage and she leaped in at the opening like a lioness on a prey. "Wound me?" she almost screamed. "I vow that you mistake. Dr. Gilbert, you have not studied the French language in as good sources as medicine, I fear. Members of my class are not wounded by inferiors, only tired." "Excuse me, madam," he returned, "I forgot I was called in to a patient. You are about to stifle with excitement and I shall call your women to put you to bed." She walked up and down the room, infuriated at being treated like a great child, and, turning, said: [Pg 160] "You are Dr. Gilbert? Strange—I have a girlish memory of one of your name. A boy who looked unkempt, tattered and torn like a little Jean Jacques Rousseau when a vagabond, who was delving the ground with the spade held in his dirty, crooked hands." "It was I," replied the other calmly. "It was in 1772, that the little gardener's boy to whom you kindly allude, was earning his bread by working in the royal gardens of Trianon. That is seventeen years ago, and much has happened in that time. It needed no longer to make the wild boy a learned man: revolutionary eras are the forcing-beds of mind. Clear as your glance is, your Majesty does not see that the youth is a man of thirty; it is wrong to be astonished that little Gilbert, simple and uncouth, should have become a learned philosopher in the breath of two revolutions." "Simple? perhaps we will recur to that on another occasion," said the Queen vindictively: "but let us have to do with the learned philosopher, the improved and perfect man whom I have under my eyes." Gilbert did not notice the sneer though he knew it was a fresh insult. "You are appointed medical attendant to the King," she continued: "it is clear that I have the welfare of my husband too near my heart to entrust his health to a stranger." "I offered myself, madam," responded Gilbert, "and his Majesty accepted me without any doubts on my capacity and zeal. I am mainly a political physician, vouched for by Minister Necker. But if the King has need of my knowledge of the scalpel and drugs, I can be as good a healer as human science allows one of our race to be. But the King most wants, besides the good adviser and physician, a good friend." "You, a friend of the King?" exclaimed the lady, with a new outbreak of scorn. "By virtue of your quackery and charms? have we gone back to the Dark Ages and are you going to rule France with elixirs and jugglery like a Faust?" "I have no pretentions that way." "Oh, why have you given that branch? you might, in the same way as you sent Andrea to sleep, put the monsters under a spell who howl and spit fire on our threshold." [Pg 161] This time Gilbert could not help blushing at the allusion to mesmerizing Andrea, which was of inexpressible delight to her who baited him as she believed she had left a wound. "For you can send people to sleep," she pursued: "you no doubt have studied magnetism with those villains who make slumber a treacherous weapon and read our secrets in our sleep." "Indeed, madam, I have studied magnetism under the wise Cagliostro." "That teacher of moral theft, who taught his disciples how to rifle bodies and souls by his infamous practice!" Gilbert understood all by this, and she shuddered with joy to the core at seeing him lose color. "Wretch," she rejoiced, "I have stung him to the quick and the blood flows." But the deepest emotions did not long hold the mesmerizer in their spell. Approaching the Queen who was rash enough to look up in her triumph and let her eyes be caught, he said: "You are wrong to judge fellow-creatures so harshly. You denounce Cagliostro as a quack when you had a proof of his real science; when you were the Archduchess of Austria and first came to France. When I saw you at Taverney, did not that wonder-worker whom you decry show to your Majesty in a clear cup of water such a picture of your fate that you swooned away?" Gilbert had not seen the forecast, but he knew from his master, no doubt, what Marie Antoinette had been shown. He struck so hard that she turned dreadfully pale. "Yes," she said in a hoarse voice, "he showed me a hideous machine of bloodshed. But I do not yet know that such a thing exists." "I know not that, but he cannot be denied the rank of sage who held such might over his fellow-beings." "His fellows?" sneered the Queen. "Nay, his power was so great that crowned heads sank beneath his level," went on Gilbert. "Shame! I tell you that Cagliostro was a cowardly charlatan, and his mesmeric sleep a crime. In one case it resulted [Pg 162] in a deed for which human justice, represented by me, shall seize the author and punish him." "Madam, be indulgent for those who have sinned." "Ho, ho! you confess then?" She thought by the gentleness of his tone that he was imploring her mercy. Some forgot herself and looked at him to scorch him with her indignation. But her glance crossed his only to melt like a steel blade on which the electric fluid falls and she felt her hatred change to fright, while she recoiled a step to elude coming wrath. "Ah, madam, do you understand what the power is I had from the master whom you defamed? believe that if I were not the most respectful of your subjects, I could convince you by a terrible experiment. I might constrain you to write down with your own hands lines that would convince you when you read them at your release from the charm. But mark how solid is the patience and the generosity of the man whom you have been insulting, and whom you placed in the Bastile. You regret it was broken open because he was released by the people. And you will hate me, and continue to doubt when I relax the bond with which I hold you." Ceasing to govern her with glances and magnetic passes, he allowed her to regain some self-control, like the bird in the vacuum, to whom a little air is restored. "Send me to sleep—force me to speak or write while sleep-bound," cried the Queen, white with terror. "Have you dared? Do you know that your threat is high-treason? a crime punishable with death!" "Do not cry out too soon. If I thus charmed you and forced you to betray your inmost secrets it would be with a witness by. He would repeat your revelations so as to leave you no doubt." "A witness? but, think, sir, that a witness to such a deed would be an accomplice." "A husband is not the accomplice to an experiment he favors on his wife." "The King?" screamed Marie Antoinette with dread, revealing rather the wife than the medium reluctant to make a scene for the spiritualist: "fie, Dr. Gilbert!" [Pg 163] "The King, your natural defender, your sustainer," replied Gilbert quietly. "He would relate, when you were awakened, how respectful I was, while proud in proving my science on the most venerated of sovereigns." He left her to meditate on the depth of his words. "I see," she said at length, "you must be a mortal enemy——" "Or a proven friend——" "Impossible; friendship cannot dwell beside fear or distrust." "Between subject and monarch, friendship cannot live but on the confidence the subject inspires. I have made the vow not to use my weapons but to repulse the wrongs done me. All for defense, nothing for offence!" "Alas," moaned the Queen: "I see that you set a trap. After frightening the woman, you seek to rule the Queen." "No, lady, I am not a paltry speculator. You are the first woman in whom I have found all feminine passions with all the dominant faculties of man. You can be a woman and a friend. I admire you and would serve you. I will do it without receiving aught from you—merely to study you. I will do more to show you how I serve you: if I am in the way send me forth." "Send you hence," said she with gladness. "But no doubt you will reflect that my power can be exercised from afar. It is true: but do not fear—I shall not employ it." The Queen was musing, unable to reply to this strange man when steps were heard in the corridor. "The King," she exclaimed. "Then point out the door by which I may depart without being seen by him." "Stay," she said. He bowed, and remained impassible while she sought to read on his brow to what point triumph rose in him more plain than anger or disquiet. "At least he might have shown his delight," she thought. <hr class="chap" /> [Pg 164] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.