The member of the Convention extended his hand to the Bishop, but the Bishop did not take it.
The Bishop confined himself to the remark:--
"I am pleased to see that I have been misinformed.
You certainly do not seem to me to be ill."
"Monsieur," replied the old man, "I am going to recover."
He paused, and then said:--
"I shall die three hours hence."
Then he continued:--
"I am something of a doctor; I know in what fashion the last hour draws on.
Yesterday, only my feet were cold; to-day, the chill has ascended to my knees; now I feel it mounting to my waist; when it reaches the heart, I shall stop.
The sun is beautiful, is it not?
I had myself wheeled out here to take a last look at things.
You can talk to me; it does not fatigue me.
You have done well to come and look at a man who is on the point of death. It is well that there should be witnesses at that moment.
One has one's caprices; I should have liked to last until the dawn, but I know that I shall hardly live three hours.
It will be night then. What does it matter, after all?
Dying is a simple affair. One has no need of the light for that.
So be it.
I shall die by starlight."
The old man turned to the shepherd lad:--
"Go to thy bed; thou wert awake all last night; thou art tired."
The child entered the hut.
The old man followed him with his eyes, and added, as though speaking to himself:--
"I shall die while he sleeps.
The two slumbers may be good neighbors."
The Bishop was not touched as it seems that he should have been. He did not think he discerned God in this manner of dying; let us say the whole, for these petty contradictions of great hearts must be indicated like the rest:
he, who on occasion, was so fond of laughing at "His Grace," was rather shocked at not being addressed as Monseigneur, and he was almost tempted to retort "citizen." He was assailed by a fancy for peevish familiarity, common enough to doctors and priests, but which was not habitual with him. This man, after all, this member of the Convention, this representative of the people, had been one of the powerful ones of the earth; for the first time in his life, probably, the Bishop felt in a mood to be severe.
Meanwhile, the member of the Convention had been surveying him with a modest cordiality, in which one could have distinguished, possibly, that humility which is so fitting when one is on the verge of returning to dust.
The Bishop, on his side, although he generally restrained his curiosity, which, in his opinion, bordered on a fault, could not refrain from examining the member of the Convention with an attention which, as it did not have its course in sympathy, would have served his conscience as a matter of reproach, in connection with any other man. A member of the Convention produced on him somewhat the effect of being outside the pale of the law, even of the law of charity.
G----, calm, his body almost upright, his voice vibrating, was one of those octogenarians who form the subject of astonishment to the physiologist. The Revolution had many of these men, proportioned to the epoch. In this old man one was conscious of a man put to the proof. Though so near to his end, he preserved all the gestures of health. In his clear glance, in his firm tone, in the robust movement of his shoulders, there was something calculated to disconcert death. Azrael, the Mohammedan angel of the sepulchre, would have turned back, and thought that he had mistaken the door.
G---- seemed to be dying because he willed it so.
There was freedom in his agony.
His legs alone were motionless.
It was there that the shadows held him fast. His feet were cold and dead, but his head survived with all the power of life, and seemed full of light.
G----, at this solemn moment, resembled the king in that tale of the Orient who was flesh above and marble below.
There was a stone there.
The Bishop sat down.
The exordium was abrupt.
"I congratulate you," said he, in the tone which one uses for a reprimand.
"You did not vote for the death of the king, after all."
The old member of the Convention did not appear to notice the bitter meaning underlying the words "after all."
He replied. The smile had quite disappeared from his face.
"Do not congratulate me too much, sir.
I did vote for the death of the tyrant."
It was the tone of austerity answering the tone of severity.
"What do you mean to say?" resumed the Bishop.
"I mean to say that man has a tyrant,--ignorance.
I voted for the death of that tyrant.
That tyrant engendered royalty, which is authority falsely understood, while science is authority rightly understood. Man should be governed only by science."
"And conscience," added the Bishop.
"It is the same thing.
Conscience is the quantity of innate science which we have within us."
Monseigneur Bienvenu listened in some astonishment to this language, which was very new to him.
The member of the Convention resumed:--
"So far as Louis XVI.
was concerned, I said `no.' I did not think that I had the right to kill a man; but I felt it my duty to exterminate evil.
I voted the end of the tyrant, that is to say, the end of prostitution for woman, the end of slavery for man, the end of night for the child.
In voting for the Republic, I voted for that.
I voted for fraternity, concord, the dawn. I have aided in the overthrow of prejudices and errors.
The crumbling away of prejudices and errors causes light.
We have caused the fall of the old world, and the old world, that vase of miseries, has become, through its upsetting upon the human race, an urn of joy."
"Mixed joy," said the Bishop.
"You may say troubled joy, and to-day, after that fatal return of the past, which is called 1814, joy which has disappeared! Alas!
The work was incomplete, I admit:
we demolished the ancient regime in deeds; we were not able to suppress it entirely in ideas. To destroy abuses is not sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the wind is still there."
"You have demolished.
It may be of use to demolish, but I distrust a demolition complicated with wrath."
"Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of progress.
In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent of Christ.
Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all the unknown social quantities; it softened spirits, it calmed, appeased, enlightened; it caused the waves of civilization to flow over the earth.
It was a good thing.
The French Revolution is the consecration of humanity."
The Bishop could not refrain from murmuring:--
"Yes? '93!"
The member of the Convention straightened himself up in his chair with an almost lugubrious solemnity, and exclaimed, so far as a dying man is capable of exclamation:--
"Ah, there you go; '93!
I was expecting that word.
A cloud had been forming for the space of fifteen hundred years; at the end of fifteen hundred years it burst.
You are putting the thunderbolt on its trial."
The Bishop felt, without, perhaps, confessing it, that something within him had suffered extinction.
Nevertheless, he put a good face on the matter.
He replied:--
"The judge speaks in the name of justice; the priest speaks in the name of pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice. A thunderbolt should commit no error."
And he added, regarding the member of the Convention steadily the while, "Louis XVII.?"
The conventionary stretched forth his hand and grasped the Bishop's arm.
"Louis XVII.! let us see.
For whom do you mourn? is it for the innocent child? very good; in that case I mourn with you. Is it for the royal child?
I demand time for reflection. To me, the brother of Cartouche, an innocent child who was hung up by the armpits in the Place de Greve, until death ensued, for the sole crime of having been the brother of Cartouche, is no less painful than the grandson of Louis XV., an innocent child, martyred in the tower of the Temple, for the sole crime of having been grandson of Louis XV."
"Monsieur," said the Bishop, "I like not this conjunction of names."
"Cartouche?
Louis XV.? To which of the two do you object?"
A momentary silence ensued.
The Bishop almost regretted having come, and yet he felt vaguely and strangely shaken.
The conventionary resumed:--
"Ah, Monsieur Priest, you love not the crudities of the true. Christ loved them.
He seized a rod and cleared out the Temple. His scourge, full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried, `Sinite parvulos,' he made no distinction between the little children.
It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the Dauphin of Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod.
Innocence, Monsieur, is its own crown.
Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august in rags as in fleurs de lys."
"That is true," said the Bishop in a low voice.
"I persist," continued the conventionary G---- "You have mentioned Louis XVII.
to me.
Let us come to an understanding.
Shall we weep for all the innocent, all martyrs, all children, the lowly as well as the exalted?
I agree to that.
But in that case, as I have told you, we must go back further than '93, and our tears must begin before Louis XVII.
I will weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep with me over the children of the people."
"I weep for all," said the Bishop.
"Equally!" exclaimed conventionary G----; "and if the balance must incline, let it be on the side of the people.
They have been suffering longer."
Another silence ensued.
The conventionary was the first to break it. He raised himself on one elbow, took a bit of his cheek between his thumb and his forefinger, as one does mechanically when one interrogates and judges, and appealed to the Bishop with a gaze full of all the forces of the death agony.
It was almost an explosion.
"Yes, sir, the people have been suffering a long while.
And hold! that is not all, either; why have you just questioned me and talked to me about Louis XVII.? I know you not.
Ever since I have been in these parts I have dwelt in this enclosure alone, never setting foot outside, and seeing no one but that child who helps me. Your name has reached me in a confused manner, it is true, and very badly pronounced, I must admit; but that signifies nothing:
clever men have so many ways of imposing on that honest goodman, the people. By the way, I did not hear the sound of your carriage; you have left it yonder, behind the coppice at the fork of the roads, no doubt. I do not know you, I tell you.
You have told me that you are the Bishop; but that affords me no information as to your moral personality. In short, I repeat my question.
Who are you?
You are a bishop; that is to say, a prince of the church, one of those gilded men with heraldic bearings and revenues, who have vast prebends,-- the bishopric of D---- fifteen thousand francs settled income, ten thousand in perquisites; total, twenty-five thousand francs,-- who have kitchens, who have liveries, who make good cheer, who eat moor-hens on Friday, who strut about, a lackey before, a lackey behind, in a gala coach, and who have palaces, and who roll in their carriages in the name of Jesus Christ who went barefoot! You are a prelate,--revenues, palace, horses, servants, good table, all the sensualities of life; you have this like the rest, and like the rest, you enjoy it; it is well; but this says either too much or too little; this does not enlighten me upon the intrinsic and essential value of the man who comes with the probable intention of bringing wisdom to me.
To whom do I speak? Who are you?"
The Bishop hung his head and replied, "Vermis sum--I am a worm."
"A worm of the earth in a carriage?" growled the conventionary.
It was the conventionary's turn to be arrogant, and the Bishop's to be humble.
The Bishop resumed mildly:--
"So be it, sir.
But explain to me how my carriage, which is a few paces off behind the trees yonder, how my good table and the moor-hens which I eat on Friday, how my twenty-five thousand francs income, how my palace and my lackeys prove that clemency is not a duty, and that '93 was not inexorable.
The conventionary passed his hand across his brow, as though to sweep away a cloud.
"Before replying to you," he said, "I beseech you to pardon me. I have just committed a wrong, sir.
You are at my house, you are my guest, I owe you courtesy.
You discuss my ideas, and it becomes me to confine myself to combating your arguments.
Your riches and your pleasures are advantages which I hold over you in the debate; but good taste dictates that I shall not make use of them.
I promise you to make no use of them in the future."
"I thank you," said the Bishop.
G---- resumed.
"Let us return to the explanation which you have asked of me. Where were we?
What were you saying to me?
That '93 was inexorable?"
"Inexorable; yes," said the Bishop.
"What think you of Marat clapping his hands at the guillotine?"
"What think you of Bossuet chanting the Te Deum over the dragonnades?"
The retort was a harsh one, but it attained its mark with the directness of a point of steel.
The Bishop quivered under it; no reply occurred to him; but he was offended by this mode of alluding to Bossuet.
The best of minds will have their fetiches, and they sometimes feel vaguely wounded by the want of respect of logic.
The conventionary began to pant; the asthma of the agony which is mingled with the last breaths interrupted his voice; still, there was a perfect lucidity of soul in his eyes.
He went on:--
"Let me say a few words more in this and that direction; I am willing.
Apart from the Revolution, which, taken as a whole, is an immense human affirmation, '93 is, alas! a rejoinder. You think it inexorable, sir; but what of the whole monarchy, sir? Carrier is a bandit; but what name do you give to Montrevel? Fouquier-Tainville is a rascal; but what is your opinion as to Lamoignon-Baville? Maillard is terrible; but Saulx-Tavannes, if you please?
