PART III. ON THE BOULEVARDS.

Summer had come, and was nearly gone. Paris was deserted. As autumn approached, lifting its fiery finger over the city, the flaneurs disappeared. All those who could flee, fled. The faubourg had fled long ago to its châteaux. The Chaussée d’Antin and the Champs Elysées were fleeing aux eaux or aux bains de mer and the boulevards, with their glittering shops and cafés and theatres, were left to the mercy of the tourist. Perhaps the tourist would retort that he was left to the mercy of the boulevards. And, perhaps he would be right. Chignoned sirens, who dwelt in glass cases surrounded by millions of glass vials ranged in rhythmic color from the ceiling to the floor, so as to make the sirens look as much as possible like the centre point of an elaborate kaleidoscope, smiled through their crystal shell at the reckless being who stood outside to peep and wonder. The door stood open. He might not hear the siren’s, “Entrez, monsieur!” but there was no being deaf to her smile; it drew him irresistibly.

“Would monsieur not like just to ‘gouter’ our last novelty, ‘cerise à la Victor Noir?’ Would he not very much like to take some little souvenir home to madame?”

Of course monsieur would. Weak mortal! He unbuttons his coat, and straightway the bees which had sipped abundantly of native porte-monnaies the rest of the year, alight on the purse of the tourist, and suck it, if not dry, as nearly dry as they can.

Busy “dead season,” when stale bonbons and faded finery are brought out, christened by new names, and sold to the barbarians across the Channel. Paris does not want any more of it, but Londres, that city which the English in their ignorance of the French language call Lon-don—Londres will find it charming!

Gaily, busily the bees were plying their task. The long white lines of Haussmann barracks glared shadowless in the fierce vertical sun; gilded railings and balconies flashed in gingerbread magnificence; the dome of the Invalides rose up against the cloudless blue and blazed like a burning mount; the red heat poured down from the zenith on the miles of asphalte that meander through the city, and pelted it till it softened and gave under your foot like india-rubber. Even the lordly chestnuts of the Tuileries, so carefully tended, so abundantly watered, were burnt brown and red, and were shedding their leaves from exhaustion; not a vestige of green was anywhere visible. The fountains were playing, but even they had a tired, worn-out look, and the water seemed to go on splashing lazily from mere force of habit; the flag was still floating above the palace, the gray old palace blinking with its myriad glass eyes in the sultry noon; the broad walks were deserted, no little feet went pattering on the gravel, no merry child-laughter rang through the shade to scare the swallows from their cool siesta; the whole scene, lately so animated and bright, had a weary, day-after-the-ball look that was premature in the first days of July.

The bees of the boulevard were buzzing loud, and bestirring themselves to good purpose. But, hark! What noise is that? Not the cannon’s opening roar, nor “the car rattling o’er the stony street,” but a sound that jars upon the lively hum, and makes the hive suspend labor and hush itself to listen. It comes from the Corps Législatif, first a faint surging sound, then a clamor as of the waves rising and lashing themselves up for a tempest. Louder it grows, and nearer. It crosses the tepid waters of the Seine, lying low between its banks; it reaches the boulevards. At first the cries are indistinguishable, a torrent of human voice, rolling and heaving and rushing like the roar of a cataract, drowning all sense in its senseless frenzy. On it comes, gathering strength in its march, waking up the echoes of the trottoir, and making the crisp leaves quiver and drop, and fly along the dusty pavement before the vociferating multitude like straws before a bellows.

“What is it? Is it a revolution?” cried Berthe, as the horses, laying back their ears, threatened mischief, and obliged the footman to get down and hold them.

“I don’t know, madame,” said the man, looking up the Rue de la Paix at the stream that was pouring along the boulevards, to the sound of beating drums, and blaring trumpets, and all manner of Parisian excitableness in the shape of noise. “It’s more likely une démonstration patriotique; the horses don’t seem to like it, or else we might drive up close and see.”

But Berthe’s curiosity was not proof against a certain mistrust of the sovereign people. The noise might mean nothing more aggressive than a démonstration patriotique, but in Paris patriotism has many moods and phases, and innumerable modes of expressing itself, and its attitudes, if always effective from a dramatic point of view, are not always agreeable to come close to, and, whatever the character of this particular one might be, Berthe preferred admiring it from a respectful distance.

“Turn back, and drive home by the Champs Elysées,” she said.

But the tide had risen too rapidly. The Rue de Rivoli was flooded. It had caught the delirium of the boulevards, and was sending back their echoes with frantic exultation. Cabs and omnibuses were seized with the sudden insanity, private coaches caught it, foot-passengers, gamins, and bourgeois, and messieurs les voyageurs careering on the top of omnibuses, all en masse caught it, and shouted as one man: “Vive la France! vive la guerre! A Berlin! à Berlin!” Ladies and gentlemen, reclining in soft-cushioned carriages, started suddenly into effervescence, waved hats and handkerchiefs, and cried: “Vive la guerre! A Berlin!” Horses neighed, and dogs barked, and the very paving-stones shook to the popular passion. All Paris shouted and shrieked till the city, like a huge belfry, rang with thundering salvos: “Vive la guerre! A Berlin! à Berlin!”

Berthe’s horses, scared anew by the uproar that was now close upon them, played their part in the general row by plunging and prancing, and eliciting screams of terror from the adjacent women and children, while the coachman brandished his whip, and the footman whirled his hat in the air, and shouted with all their might: “A Berlin! à Berlin!” A troop of gamins laid violent hands on a Savoyard who was grinding away “Non ti scordar di me,” to the delight of the concierge in the nearest porte-cochère, and, dragging him to the fore, bade him at once strike up the Marseillaise. Luckily for his limbs, the despotic command was within the limits of the Savoyard’s instrument. He turned its handle, and began vigorously grinding out the Republican chant. Every man, woman, and child within ear-shot took up the chorus, “Marchons! marchons!” till the palpitating air throbbed and thrilled with the passionate voices of the multitude.

Berthe was not long proof against the magnetic current that was whirling round her. First terrified, then bewildered, then electrified, she caught the intoxication, and yielded to its impulse: “Vive la France! Vive la guerre!” And the fair hand waved its snowy little flag from the window as the carriage moved slowly past the Tuileries gardens.

Emerging into the broad space of the Place de la Concorde, the horses seemed to breathe more freely, and, quickening their step, tore at full speed up the Champs Elysées.

“What possessed me to shout and cheer with those madmen?” said Berthe, soliloquizing aloud, and laughing at the absurdity of her recent behavior. “I must have gone mad myself for the moment. Vive la guerre indeed! Heaven help us! We shall hear another cry by-and-by, when the widows and orphans and sisters of France hear at what price her new laurels have been bought. Thank God I have no brothers!”

“Madame la Marquise de Chassedot is waiting, madame,” said François, as Berthe entered.

“Has she been waiting?”

“A short half-hour, madame.”

“What can she have to say?” thought Berthe.

Madame de Chassedot rose to meet her “with eyes that had wept,” and extended her hands with an air that asked less for greeting than for sympathy.

“Vous ange de la peine, madame!” exclaimed Berthe, her ready kindness going forth at once to the sufferer.

The two ladies were not friends. They had met at Madame de Beaucœur’s and Madame de Galliac’s; but only once had there been a personal interchange of visits; Madame de Chassedot had called on Berthe to thank her for the kindness she had shown to their young kinswoman, Hélène de Karodel, “whom the family had indeed of late lost sight of, but with whom they were delighted to renew cousinship,” the marquise declared effusively, and as a proof of this she was carrying off Hélène to the country to spend the vacation with them. Berthe did not inform her that it had taken all her own influence to induce the high-spirited young lady to accept the hospitality so tardily offered. She returned Madame de Chassedot’s visit; the latter soon left for the country, and they had not met since.

“Oui, j’ai du chagrin,” said the marquise holding Berthe’s hand, as she sat down beside her.

Berthe’s first thought was of Edgar. But the mother was not in mourning. Whatever it was, the worst had not yet come.

“Your son is ill?” she said.

Madame de Chassedot shook her head. Then, after a pause, during which she gave battle to her emotion, she looked at Berthe, and said:

“He’s going to get married!”

“What! And is not that precisely what you wanted him to do!” exclaimed Berthe.

“I wanted to make the match myself; but now he goes and does it instead,” replied the marquise.

“Ah! It is a mésalliance, then!”

The fact was startling certainly, but less so than it might have been, owing to certain rumors that prepared the public to believe in any extravagance coupled with Edgar de Chassedot’s name.

“Oh! mon Dieu, non! A thousand times no!” cried his mother with quick resentment. “Edgar a fait des bêtises, but he is incapable of dishonoring himself. Oh, no! The girl is of an excellent family, she is even our own cousin.”

“It is her principles, then, or her—character that you object to?” said Berthe with some hesitation.

“O dear! no. She is as pious as a seraph, and brought up like a lily!” exclaimed the marquise.

“Is she a hunch-back, then, or lame, or blind, or what?”

“She is a beggar! A beggar who has not a sou to buy her own trousseau. It is a beggar who has stolen the heart of my son!” And tears of bitter, disappointed motherhood flowed down the cheeks of the marquise.

“And her name is—?”

“Mademoiselle de Karodel!”

“What! Hélène? Hélène de Karodel, that brave, true, gentle creature is going to be your son’s wife! And you in tears, and not of joy! And you call her a beggar! A woman whose love, since your son has been lucky enough to win it—and Hélène is not a girl to marry him if he had not—would be a prize for a prince! And you, a Christian mother, weep over it, and expect to be pitied! Really, madame, if it were not laughable, it would be deplorable, not on your son’s account, but on your own!”

Madame de Chassedot was so staggered by this unexpected sortie that she was actually struck dumb. “Do you know,” she said, after a pause, looking steadily at Berthe, and bringing out her words with slow emphasis—“do you know, madame, that my son has four millions of patrimony, and that he could have married any girl in France?”

“As to his marrying any girl in France, admitting that they were one and all ready to marry Monsieur de Chassedot, was he ready to marry them?” demanded Berthe significantly; “and as to his four millions, they are the very reason why he should marry a girl who had none. A woman who is as well born as himself, who is, you admit, pure as a lily, and pious as an angel, and, moreover, quite graceful and beautiful enough to satisfy your pride and his, and to make her an ornament as well as a treasure in your son’s house—a wife who will rescue him from much that I should fancy would have given you greater cause for tears than his marriage with such a woman as Hélène de Karodel. Candidly, chère marquise, I am so far from sympathizing with you that, if I had heard this news in any other way, my first impulse would have been to fly to you with my congratulations.”

Madame de Chassedot’s tears were flowing still, but perhaps less bitterly; she was going to speak when a noise of steps in the ante-chamber made her rise hastily, and look round for a means of escape.

“Into my bedroom!” said Berthe, pulling aside the portière.

The marquise pressed her hand, and disappeared through the cloud of blue satin just as the drawing-room door opened, and Hélène de Karodel, holding out her arms with a cry of joy, rushed into Berthe’s.

It was something of a disappointment to Hélène to find that Berthe already knew her secret. But there was much left to tell still. Most of the tale was told with blushes and smiles, and tears that had no brine in them. Her marriage was to take place in a fortnight. Edgar, from family reasons, chose to precipitate the dénouement, and his young Bretonne fiancée had come up to town to make the few bridal preparations that he could not possibly make for her.

It happened unluckily to be Berthe’s day, so the usual stream of visitors began soon to pour in, and broke up the tête-à-tête of the two friends.

The war was the topic of every tongue; but there was no mistaking for enthusiasm the animation with which it was discussed. Some indignantly repudiated and denounced the government, and protested that, so far from being a popular war, it was universally condemned as senseless, iniquitous, and ill-timed, and that there were not ten men in France who would cry Vive la guerre! unless they were paid for it. Others, who had been on the boulevards an hour ago, thought differently.

“There are madmen to be found in every city who are glad of an opportunity to bark, and bray, and howl, and demean themselves after the usual manner of madmen,” said the Austrian habitué, “and Paris can muster as good a roll of lunatics on as short notice as any city in Europe; but I don’t believe there were ten sane men on the boulevards this morning who cried Vive la guerre!”

“I can assure you,” said Berthe, “I saw hundreds of comme-il-faut-looking men, to all appearance in their right mind, who were crying it frantically; so much so that I got quite carried away, and actually shook my handkerchief, and shouted with the rest of them.”

“Why did you shout, madame?” inquired the Austrian.

“Because, I tell you, I was carried away, I could not help myself. The excitement was catching.”

“Of course it was. Most fevers are, especially malignant ones; and if you asked nine-tenths of the crowd why they shouted, the answer, if they spoke the truth, would be precisely the same; they could not help themselves, the excitement was catching. If an arsenal blows up, who is to blame, the powder, the matches, or yourself who fired the train? You might just as logically blame the powder for blowing up, as the French people for marching and bugling and Vive-la-guerring when they hear the sound of the trumpet.”

“Do you agree with monsieur?” asked Berthe addressing a quiet-looking military man who had been listening in silence to the conversation. “Are the people not really glad of the war?”

“It is difficult to say yet,” replied the soldier. “With the people, all depends on how it turns out; success alone is in the right.”

“But you do not contemplate such an absurd alternative as the non-victoriousness of the French arms?”

There was a prompt general protest from the company. The military man alone stroked his moustache with a meditative air, and was silent.

“Answer me, I pray you, commandant,” pursued Berthe. “You are not afraid of our troops being beaten?”

“Our troops are matches, if not masters, of the best troops in Europe,” replied the commandant proudly.

“And our generals? We have no lack of good ones surely?”

“Not of veterans,” was the evasive rejoinder.

“Oh! the young ones will rise up as soon as they are wanted. We shall have a new generation of heroes that will eclipse in glory the vieux de la Vieille themselves. As for you, you will come back to us a marshal of France,” declared Berthe merrily.

The prophecy elicited gentle cheering and congratulations from the ladies, while the men approved in their own way, joking the commandant, and dubbing him Monsieur le Maréchal on the spot.

“If it be not a futile or indiscreet question to put, may I ask what you are going to war for?” demanded Mr. Clifford, addressing himself to the company in general.

“For security of the dynasty,” replied a Legitimist.

“For the honor and security of France,” said the commandant.

“Do you separate them, M. le Commandant!” exclaimed the Legitimist with mock horror. “I arraign you, de par l’Empereur, for high treason against France!”

The circle laughed, and the Commandant, not caring to challenge the persifleur, laughed good-humoredly, too.

“Shall I tell you, monsieur, why we are going to war?” said the Deputy de la Gauche to Mr. Clifford. “We are going to war to désennuyer Paris. If Paris goes on much longer ennuying herself as she has done for the last six months, she will make a revolution!”

“That may be quite true,” returned his colleague of the Droite; “but the preventive is rather violent; some milder form of excitement might be invented for the ennui of Paris than that of taking her to Berlin for a distraction. It is hardly a sufficient reason for plunging the whole nation into war. No, I prefer to think we are going to fight for the honor of France, and it may be for her aggrandizement.”

“Yes,” said Madame de Beaucœur, “M. le Maréchal will win his bâton by taking the Rhine for us!”

“Bravo,” cried in chorus the Legitimist, the Droite, and the Gauche. “Le Rhin! le Rhin! Vive le Rhin!”

“I will be willing to shake hands with ce gaillard lâ, and to cry Vive l’Empereur myself, if he comes back with the Rhine in his pocket,” declared the Legitimist with desperate patriotism.

And the sentiment was echoed by every one present. Orleanist, Bourbonist, Bonapartist, and Republican all united in a common thirst for the blue waters of the Rhine, and avowed themselves ready to vote the war, whatever its motive, a wise war and a righteous, if it gave the Rhine to France. All with one exception: the old academician shook his head, and muttered some broken sentences in which the words, démence, fanfaronnade, ruine du commerce, feu follet de la gloire, décadence des mœurs, jour de rétribution, etc., were audible through the general hubbub.

“What a people, mon Dieu!” murmured the philosopher to himself, as, descending the softly carpeted stairs, cries of “A Berlin! A Berlin dans six semaines! Vive le Rhin! Vive la guerre!” followed him through the open door of Berthe’s apartment; “fitful as the wind, passing from reason to madness, from heroism to absurdity, as the weathercock turns with the breeze.” The word that touches our vanity, touches every chord in our nature, and sets us in a blaze, just as the spark fires the powder-flask. Quel peuple? Mon Dieu, quel peuple!