The Fugitives
DURING THE HOURS BEFORE SUNRISE on 21 May 1839, Jean Baptiste Lamy, accompanied by his closest friend and former school-mate Joseph Priest Machebeuf, made his way on foot through the silent streets of the old Roman town of Riom, in the Massif Central of France. With his companion he was walking toward the Paris highway, crossing the northern arc of the great drive which circled the city after the manner of roads laid upon buried Roman fortifications. Within the town were small dark enclaves of medieval stone—gray, damp, impregnated with rank airs from the barnyards on the green hillsides all about. Beyond in the dimness sat the low, small-timbered mountains of Auvergne.
Lamy was not well. He had recently risen from a sickbed to join his friend in Riom, but his determination was calm. The better not to be noticed, he was dressed as a layman, and so was Machebeuf. In their usual dress, since they were both priests, they would be marked that night if anyone should see them. Lamy, the younger, was twenty-five years old and had been ordained only six months before. Machebeuf, twenty-seven, had received final holy orders two years and five months earlier. Their states of mind and emotion were high. With baggage for a journey of thousands of miles, they were going to the open highway in the pre-dawn twilight to await the fast coach from Lyon to Paris, and the first stage of an expedition.
In spite of their care, they were even at so early an hour seen and recognized by a former fellow student. He queried them. They now risked telling him of their plans, shaking hands in farewell. Their interceptor later reported their emotion as they parted—the unexpected friend perhaps on his way to early Mass, the other two walking to the outskirts, where there were houses to pass even after the new travellers should be safely aboard the coach.
They were fugitives from home who understood that if their plans were known, one of them might have to face obstacles which would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to overcome. As in every joint exploit, one was the mover, the other the recruit. In this case it was Machebeuf, small and impulsive, who had laid the long train of arrangements which brought them both to the coach stop, and whose consequences were to last their lifetimes. But it was the other, Lamy, taller, deliberate and mild, who was destined to become the leader in lifetime terms. What these were to be, they could not foresee except in the most general way, yet were compelling enough to make the young men take flight. For occasions of defeat or hazard, the patois of their homeland had a proverb which made people laugh in self-recognition when they heard it spoken—“Latsin pas!”—and behind it lived the spirit which moved the fugitives to set aside, for their own purposes, home and those they loved, for it meant, “Never give up.”
The coach came and bustled to a halt, they entered, and rolled on. There was one more peril—the road led directly past the house of Machebeuf’s father, who was Riom’s leading baker. Day was now breaking. Machebeuf had the impulse to halt for a moment to take leave; but higher obedience prevailed, and passing his father’s door he threw himself to the floor of the coach in the rue de la Charité to avoid even the chance of recognition. Lamy knew how he felt, for, though his parents were aware of his plans to go, he himself had come away without saying an outright farewell to them when he had seen them the day before in their village of Lempdes, to the south, below Clermont. Now he tapped Machebeuf on the shoulder to sustain his resolve. Soon it was safe to come up off the floor of the diligence and face toward Paris—a drive of over two hundred miles—and the future.
Within them rested a rich cumulation of history, tradition, belief, inherited ways, which had made them what they were; and despite the shocks of change they would meet in a new world, they took with them out of the past all to empower them for the life ahead.