“You refused them?”
“Catch me? No, I said: ‘I had better grab, for he will meet somebody else not so delicate as me, who would take them.’ Still, he need not fret himself, I shall never walk into Versailles unless I am sent for, and I do not know as I shall then.”
“What a grateful heart this rogue has,” muttered the stranger, but all he said aloud was: “It is very affecting, Master Gamain, to see devotion like yours survive misfortune. A last glass to the health of your ‘prentice.”
“Faith, he does not deserve it, but never mind! here’s to his health, all the same!” He drank. “Only to think that he had thousands of bottles in his cellar which would beat this, and he never said to a footman: Take a basket of this lush to my friend Gamain!’ Not he—he would sooner have it swilled by his Lifeguardsmen, the Swiss, or his Flanders Regiment. They did him a lot of good, I do not think!”
“What did you expect?” questioned the other, sipping his wine, “kings are ungrateful like this one. But hush! we are no longer alone.”
In fact, three persons were entering the drinking saloon, two men of the common sort and a fishfag, and they took seats at the table matching that at which Gamain and his “treater” were sitting.
The locksmith raised his eyes to them and stared with an attention making the other smile. They were truly worthy of some remark.
One of the two men was all body: the other all legs: it was hard to say anything about the woman.
All-Body resembled a dwarf: he was under five feet in hight: he may have lost an inch or so from his knees knocking although when he stood up, his feet kept apart. Instead of his countenance redeeming the deformity, it seemed to highten it;—for his oily and dirty hair was flattened down on his bald forehead; his eyebrows were so badly shaped as to seem traced at random; his eyes were usually dull but when lighted up sheeny and glassy as the toad’s. In moments of irritation, they threw out sparks like a viper’s, from concentrated pupils. His nose was flat, and deviated from the straight line so that his prominent cheek bones stood out all the more. Lastly, to complete the hideous aspect, his yellow lips only partly covered the few, black and loose teeth in his twisted mouth.
At first glance you would say that gall, not blood, flowed in his veins.
The other was so opposed to the short-legged one that he seemed a heron on its stilts. The likeness to the bird was the closer from his head being lost between his humped shoulders so as to be distinguished solely by the eyes, like blood-spots, and a long, pointed, beak-like nose. Like the heron, too, he seemed to have the ability to stretch his neck, and put out the eyes of one at a distance. His arms also were gifted with this elasticity, and while seated, he might pick up a handkerchief dropped at his feet without moving his body.
The third person was ambiguous; it being difficult to divine the sex. If a man, he was upwards of thirty-four, wearing a stylish costume of the fishmarket stallkeepers, with lace kerchief and tucker, and gold earrings and chain. His features, as well as could be made out through layers of rouge and flake white, together with beauty-patches of sticking plaster of all fancy shapes, were slightly softened as in degenerated races. As soon as one caught sight of him one wanted to hear him speak in the hope that the voice’s sound would give his dubious appearance a stamp by which he could be classed. But it was nothing to the purpose: his soprano voice left the curious observer still deeper plunged into doubt.
The shoes and stockings of the trio were daubed in mud to show that they had been tramping in the road for some time.
“Lord save us, I seem to know that woman, from having met her before,” said Gamain.
“Very likely at court,” sneered the pretended workman “their manners have been there quite a while and they have been visitors, the fishmarket dames, of late. But,” he went on, pulling his cap down on his brow and taking up his gun, “they are here on business: consequently, we had better leave them alone.”
“Do you know them?”
“By sight. Do you?”
“I say that I have met the woman before: tell me who the men are and I may put my finger on her name.”
“Of the two men, the knock-kneed one is the surgeon, Jean Paul Marat; while the humpback is Prosper Verrieres.”
“Aha!”
“Does not that put you on the right track?”
“My tongue to the dogs if it does!”
“The fishwoman is——“
“Wait, it is—but, no—impossible——“
“I see that you will not name him—the fishwoman is the Duke of Aiguillon.”
At this utterance of the title, the disguised nobleman started and turned, as well as his companions. They made a movement to rise as men do when in presence of a leader: but the pretended gunsmith laid a finger on his lips and passed them by.
Gamain followed him, believing he was in a dream.
At the doorway he was jostled by a running man, who seemed to be pursued by a mob, shouting:
“Stop him—that is the Queen’s hairdresser! stop the hairdresser!”
Among the howling and racing men were two who carried each a human head on a pikestaff. They were those of two Lifeguards, killed at Versailles in defending the Queen from the mob.
“Halloa, it is Leonard,” said the strange workman, to the fugitive.
“Silence, do not name me,” yelled the barber, dashing into the saloon.
“What do they chase him for?” inquired Gamain.
“The Lord knows,” was the response: “maybe they want him to curl the hair of the poor soldiers. In Revolutionary times, fellows have such quaint fancies!”
He mixed in with the throng, leaving Gamain, from whom he had probably extracted all he wanted, to make his way alone to his workshop at Versailles.
CHAPTER III.
THE UNDYING MAN.
IT was the more easy for the pretended gunsmith to blend with the crowd as it was numerous.
It was the advance guard of the procession around the King, Queen and the Prince Royal, leaving the court suburb at half past one.
In the royal coach were the Queen, her son, her daughter, called Madam Royale though a child, Count Provence, the King’s brother. Lady Elizabeth his sister, and the Queen’s favorite lady of the household, Andrea Taverney Countess of Charny.
In a hundred carriages came the National Assemblymen who had declared they would henceforth be inseparable from the monarch.
This mob was about a quarter of an hour ahead of the royal party, and rallied round the two royal guardsmen’s heads as their colors. All stopped at the Sevres wine saloon. The collection was of tattered and half-drunken wretches, the scum that comes to the surface whether the inundation is water or lava.
Suddenly, great stir in the concourse, for they had seen the National Guards’ bayonets and General Lafayette’s white horse, immediately preceding the royal coach.
Lafayette was fond of popular gatherings: he really reigned among the Paris