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In ordinary moments Louis would have mumbled and stuttered hopelessly; but he seemed to have been given overwhelming strength on this occasion, and surprised Henry by confirming his words with an unction worthy of the great Solomon himself. No one but a Communard could have doubted him; but Felix Pyat no more believed Louis's oath than he did Henry's documents.
Difficulties have arisen in the Quartier Val de Grace, consequent upon the heavy tax recently levied on meat. The Versaillais gunboats at the Asnières Bridge forced the Federal troops to recoil several hundred yards towards the city walls. Félix Pyat announces his opinion publicly that the fall of the Commune is imminent. Mortars are being placed on the top of the Arc de Triomphe.
I must go and you must not try to find me. I shall be quite safe, but with people you know nothing about. I shall write to Madame Pyat for my things. You need have no trouble. 'Very likely I shall pass you on the way, for if I hurry I can catch the diligence. But you will not see me. Oh, David, I put my arms round you! I press my face against you.
Her simple Italian mind was horror-stricken by language which the Abbe treated with ridicule. "Ah!" said M. Rameau, "I guess the author that firebrand Felix Pyat." "No," answered the Abbe; "the writer signs himself by the name of a more learned atheist Diderot le jeune." Here the door opened, and Raoul entered, accompanying Isaura.
M. Felix Pyat has been let out of prison. He says that he rather prefers being there than at liberty, for in his cell he can "forget that he is in a town inhabited by cowards," and devote himself to the works of M. Louis Blanc, which he calls the "Bibles of democracy." Although Trochu is neither a great general nor a great statesman, he is a gentleman.
Unhappily, those among whom it exists are not the ruling class are of the classes that are dominated over and obscured in every country the moment the populace becomes master. And at that moment the journals chiefly read were warring more against the Deity than the Prussians were denouncing soldiers who attended mass. "The Gospel certainly makes a bad soldier," writes the patriot Pyat.
"Don't say good day. An evil day for journalists and writers who do not out-Herod Blanqui and Pyat. I know not how I shall get bread and cheese. My poor suburban villa is to be pulled down by way of securing Paris; my journal will be suppressed by way of establishing the liberty of the press. I ventured to suggest that the people of France should have some choice in the form of their government."
True, the penalty of following Thiers was to be exploited by the landlord and capitalist; but then the penalty of following Pyat was to get shot like a mad dog, or at best get sent to New Caledonia, quite unnecessarily and uselessly. To put it in terms of Wagner's allegory, Alberic had got the ring back again and was marrying into the best Walhall families with it.
And alas! he also brought with him the news that Metz had actually fallen having capitulated, indeed, on October 27, the very day on which Pyat had issued his announcement. There was consternation at the Hotel-de-Ville when this became known, and the gentlemen of the Government deeply but vainly regretted the futile tactics to which they had so foolishly stooped.
Though there was enough of good in the son of Madame Rameau to revolt at the precise words in which the counsel was given, still, as the fumes of the punch yet more addled his brains, the counsel itself was acceptable; and in that sort of maddened fury which intoxication produces in some excitable temperaments, as Gustave reeled home that night leaning on the arm of stouter Edgar Ferrier, he insisted on going out of his way to pass the house in which Isaura lived, and, pausing under her window, gasped out some verses of a wild song, then much in vogue among the votaries of Felix Pyat, in which everything that existent society deems sacred was reviled in the grossest ribaldry.
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