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Just then three horsemen, dressed in the uniform of officers of the National Guard and wearing enormous tricolour cockades as large as soup-plates on their shakos, are seen to arrive at a break-neck gallop down the pass from Grenoble. St. Genis recognised them at a glance: they were Victor de Marmont, Surgeon-Captain Emery and their friend the glovemaker, Dumoulin.
The identity book had recently been signed by Jean Paul Marat, the man's latest employer, and been counter-signed by the Commissary of the section. The man in the tricolour scarf turned with some acerbity on the crowd who was still pressing round the prisoner. "Which of you here," he queried roughly, "levelled an unjust accusation against an honest citizen?"
Let him stand on another three miles as he is going, and then we will show him who and what we are. Just so; there goes his bunting Dutch, as you thought. He is beginning to feel a little anxious. Perhaps it would ease his mind a bit if you were to run the tricolour up to our gaff-end, Mr Bowen."
The record of the French revolutionary generals is in the main a gloomy one. If in 1795 it had been prophesied that all those generals who bore the tricolour to victory would vanish or bow their heads before a Corsican, the prophet would speedily have closed his croakings for ever. Yet the reality was even worse.
Because the Duke himself, with no successor assured, was powerless to side with the Royalists against the Red Government, he was at the moment obliged, for the very existence of his duchy, to hoist the tricolour upon the castle with his own flag.
At twelve the French rushed at the Malakoff, took it with ease, having caught the defenders in their bomb-proof houses, where they had gone to escape from the shells, etc. They found it difficult work to get round to the Little Redan, as the Russians had by that time got out of their holes. "However, the Malakoff was won, and the tricolour was hoisted as a signal for our attack.
In spite of the increased prosperity of the country, there was general disaffection. There were four parties the Orleanists, who held by Louis Philippe and his minister Guizot, and whose badge was the tricolour; the Legitimists, who retained their loyalty to the exiled Henry, and whose symbol was the white Bourbon flag; the Buonapartists; and the Republicans, whose badge was the red cap and flag.
Above all, he declared that he would never give up the white flag of the ancien régime. In his eyes the tricolour, which, shortly after the fall of the Bastille, Louis XVI. had recognised as the flag of France, represented the spirit of the Great Revolution, and for that great event he had the deepest loathing.
Of Robespierre who, it was said, had discovered him and brought him to Paris he was the protege and more than friend, a protection and friendship this which in '93 made any man almost omnipotent in France. He was dressed in a black riding-suit, relieved only by the white neck-cloth and the tricolour sash of office about his waist.
The King died; Parliament was dissolved on the 24th of July; and in the first excitement and bustle of the elections, while the candidates were still on the roads and the writs in the mailbags, came the news that Paris was in arms. The troops fought as well as Frenchmen ever can be got to fight against the tricolour; but by the evening of the 29th it was all over with the Bourbons.
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