Adventures of the Comte de la Muette During the Reign of Terror
9781465676436
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
One morning I awoke in La Bourbe and looked across at Deputy Bertrand as he lay sprawled over his truckle-bed, his black hair like a girl’s scattered on the pillow, his eyelids glued to his flushed cheeks, his face, all blossoming with dissipation, set into the expression of one who is sure of nothing but of his own present surrender to nothingness. Beside him were his clothes, flung upon a chair, the tri-colour sash, emblematic stole of his confused ritual, embracing all; and on a nail in the wall over his head was his preposterous hat, the little carte de civisme stuck in its band. Casimir Bertrand (one time Casimir Bertrand de Pompignan) I had known and been friendly with at Le Plessis. Later he had imbibed theories; had become successively a Lameth, a Feuillant, a Jacobin—a constitutionalist, a moderate, an extremist; had spouted in the Faubourgs and overflowed in sectional Committee rooms; had finally been elected to represent a corner of the States-General. I had known him for a pious prig, a coxcomb, a reckless bon-vivant. He was always sincere and never consistent; and now at last, in the crisis of his engaging sans-cullotism, he had persuaded me, a proscribed royalist, to take an advantage of his friendship by lodging with him. Then it was that the driving-force behind his character was revealed to me. It was militant hedonism. Like Mirabeau, he was a strange compound of energy and voluptuousness. He turned altogether on the nerves of excitement. He was like a clock lacking its pendulum, and he would crowd a dozen rounds of the dial into the space of a single hour. Such souls, racing ahead of their judgment, illustrate well the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise; and necessarily they run themselves down prematurely. Casimir was an epicure, with a palate that could joyfully accommodate itself to black bread and garlic; a sensualist, with the power to fly at a word from a hot-bed of pleasure to a dusty desert of debate. Undoubtedly in him (did I make him the mirror to my conscience), and in a certain Crépin, with whom I came subsequently to lodge, and who was of the type only a step lower in the art of self-indulgence, I had an opportunity to see reflected a very serious canker in the national constitution. Now he opened his eyes as I gazed on him, and shut them again immediately. It was not his habit to be a slug-a-bed, and I recognised that his sleep was feigned. The days of his political influence were each pregnant of astonishing possibilities to him, and he was too finished an epicure to indulge himself with more than the recuperative measure of slumber—frothed, perhaps, with a bead of æsthetic enjoyment in the long minute of waking.
