The Cardinal was encamped beyond the causeways of the city. At night, the defenders on their walls and ramparts could hear the distant sound of revelry, of music, of trumpets. They could even see the distant scarlet banners, the smoke of the luxurious camps. It was an army of vicious decadence and frivolity and silken cruelty that was besieging them, a laughing enemy merciless and bland.
An ominous stillness grew among the Rochellais, and, among the common people, fear. There was no laughter or gaiety in the city. Dread was mingled with the sunshine and the warm blue winds. As the riotous festivity increased among the besiegers, so did the heart darken and grow cold among the besieged. Had there been a grimness in the Cardinal’s camp, a silence and fatefulness, the Rochellais would have felt their own confidence rise.
The city had settled down to its siege. The weeks went by. There was little actual combat at first. The besiegers were content to prevent all entrance into the city.
Hourly, with growing despair, the watchers on the ramparts looked seaward, for the English. But the seas remained empty, full of moods, sunshine, storm or serenity—but always empty. Was there to be no rescue of those who represented the spirit of the Reformation in France? Was God to abandon them to their inhuman enemies, as he had abandoned the Huguenots to the fury of the Catholics on St. Bartholomew’s Day? History reeked with stories of such abandonment. There was no promise that this day would be different, that the siege might not end in fire, on the gibbet, in corpse-strewn streets within the embattled walls, in agony at the hands of blood-thirsty priests.
Beyond France, the religious wars were raging. This, the Rochellais knew. But they derived no particular comfort from the knowledge that all Europe was being torn apart in agony in the name of God, Christ, the Virgin, and innumerable male and female saints. They preferred that the eyes of the world be turned solely upon them, so that their own sufferings might possess singular grandeur, and the sympathy of their co-religionists. Aid, too, might be spared, before the mole strangled the city. But, instead, La Rochelle was only one small spring of anguish in an ocean of torment.
The mob was afraid for its bodies. But the leaders, Frenchman and foreigner alike, were afraid for their minds, their souls, and their ideals.
“Thus it has been, and shall always be,” commented the Duchesse de Rohan on this inexorable truth. “Tell the people that the enemy threatens their dining, their breeding, their vineyards and their lives, and they will fight to the death. But they will compromise eagerly with the enemy, if that enemy promises them that these shall be preserved to them as the price of surrender.”
She added, with cool bitterness: “At the last, we must depend upon the bellies of the vulgar for the continued existence of the soul.”
So it was, when the people began to complain in terror that their food was dwindling, that she opened her enormous cellars to the somber Mayor and bade him take what he willed for the people. She cajoled and threatened her friends into this also. “Retain your wines and fat hams,” she said to them, “and prepare to surrender the holy things, if you will.”
Nevertheless, with contempt and sadness, she observed how the people eagerly and fearfully read the broadsheets prepared by the terrible Capuchin, Père Joseph, which were smuggled into La Rochelle by real and potential traitors, and broadcast in the streets. “Surrender,” urged the sheets. “Do it today, then you can be assured of the King’s mercy and pardon, and all that you have, your homes and your commerce and your peaceful pursuits, will be retained by you. It is your leaders, your Mayor, the hateful foreigners who plot secretly to destroy France, who are betraying you, and who will look upon your death and your starvation and your punishment with cynical eyes.” Other sheets cried: “You are hungry, but the cellars of your rich and plotting leaders are filled to the rafters, and they dine and carouse while you starve!”
Other sheets, shrewdly appealing to the lower emotions of the mob, luridly described the punishments, confiscations and hangings which would take place if the Rochellais remained’ obdurate. Others, understanding the bestial hatred which lurks, waiting, in every man, asked: “Who is one of your leaders? A German, the immortal enemy of France, the brother and mercenary of England! A Spaniard, a man of a nation who looks covetously at France! A dancing Italian, creature of a nation famous for its craft, villainy, stilettoes and murderers! A Mayor, whose grandmother was a Jewess with a yellow badge! A Duchesse of the House of de Rohan, an open despiser of the poor and the oppressed! A nobleman, Arsène de Richepin, who recently perpetrated one of the foulest crimes in human history when he hung three leaders of the helpless in Chantilly, in revenge for the death of another oppressor! Men of La Rochelle! Deliver these traitors, these despoilers, to their doom, open the gates of your city to your friends and liberators, and only clemency and love shall be extended to you, Frenchmen, by your brother Frenchmen!”
“Most certainly,” said the German, Count Von Steckler, to the Duchesse, “the people laugh at such lies?” For he was an idealist, who believed that other men were as devoted and faithful as he.
But the Spaniard and the Italian, more subtle, more cynical, more realistic than this, lifted their eyebrows and twisted their lips in an ironic smile.
“They do not laugh,” said the Duchesse briefly. “The superior man laughs at lies, even if he is starving. But the inferior laugh only when they are swollen with food.”
With the utmost artfulness, the sheets refrained from any religious issue, and God was not even mentioned. They merely stressed the lie that “foreigners and the powerful” were using the poor besieged simple Rochellais for their own sinister ends, which was to set Frenchman against Frenchman for their ultimate destruction.
In one thing was the Duchesse in error: it was not only the mob which was being seduced. Among the rich and landed of the leaders in La Rochelle plans for treason were furtively discussed. They knew that even if La Rochelle successfully resisted the siege, their own estates, properties and wealth in other parts of France would be confiscated, in punishment. What would they gain, either in victory or defeat? They began to whisper of “compromise,” and, with dignified and noble faces, began to discuss why it was not possible for Frenchman, Catholic and Huguenot alike, to live in peace and amity. Who, in the beginning, had set them against each other?
Hunger began to strike the people, despite the open cellars of the more honorable. For the others, already breathing treason, locked their stores against the poor. The worst occurred when, during a brief battle on the outskirts of the walls, Père Joseph’s cousin, Feuquieres, a man deeply attached to Catholicism and the King, was captured by the Huguenots. In some strange manner, this Feuquieres had smuggled to him the finest of foodstuff from the King’s own table, brought to him under a flag of truce. The jailors who received them were most cordial to the King’s men, and, after the laden trays and baskets were passed on to obsequious lackeys within the walls, the jailors remained to converse in the friendliest fashion with the Catholic soldiers and officers.
“Never has a siege failed without the aid of the besieged,” said the Duchesse. But she was without power to punish the traitors, and the sad Mayor dared not do so.
And now the mole, far out of cannon shot, almost strangled the harbor. Seven miles of trenches enclosed La Rochelle on the land side, with twelve forts. The Rochellais, from their own battlements, saw all this calm and unhurried preparation, in which there was something inhuman and ominous. They, themselves, hungered, but they saw that the besieging army was well-clothed, well-nourished, and gay. Winter was upon them, with violent, sea-borne gales, icy spume, rain like needles of penetrating ice. The houses in the narrow cobbled streets were cold. Rain coated the windows, and froze there like a thick layer of crystal.
And still, they watched for the English, who were to rescue them.
In the meantime, conspiracy and treachery raged in and without the walls of the city. Agents, Catholic and Huguenot, passed in some secret fashion through the walls. It was Père Joseph who received them, gave them their instructions, paying them the price of their perfidy. Thereafter, he gave himself up to endless prayer, rapture and orisons.
He was having his own difficulties. The Cardinal appeared to show no enthusiasm for this siege. He made many sarcastic and witty comments about it to his old friend, and often yawned, smilingly, in his face. When the Capuchin passionately launched into diatribes against the Huguenots, prophesied that the city symbolized the struggle between the Catholic holy culture and peace in Europe, against the forces of disruption, state-domination, heresy, confusion and war, not to mention the worst, blasphemy, the Cardinal would gaze at him with his tigerish eyes gleaming, and a faint smile at the corners of his delicate and fragile mouth. At these times, waves of exhaustion and despondency would sweep over the Capuchin, and he would be near to fiery tears.
The King, himself, was horribly bored by the whole proceedings. He yearned to return to Paris, where he could be alone with his gloomy thoughts. He did not even pretend any enthusiasm. He looked with a lacklustre eye at his troops, listened to the Capuchin, and the lines of his mouth settled in obstinate lines. Sometimes he invaded the Cardinal’s quarters and complainingly upbraided him for a thousand and one trivial things, while the Cardinal listened, stifling his yawns and playing with his cross. As for Madame, she had long ago returned to Paris, pleading indisposition, which the King hoped presaged an heir. With her going, the Cardinal was overtaken by a very paralysis of ennui.
They lived in comparative comfort. Gaming tables had been set up. But beyond the tents and the barracks the melancholy swamps and marshes spread away, full of mist under dim stars and pallid moon. Every one avoided that scene as much as possible. They dined luxuriously. Père Joseph ate cold dry bread and drank the water from the ditches. Never a decadent gourmet, he castigated himself more and more, as if to balance the casual and rich living of the besiegers. The strong huts of the soldiers disgusted him; their revelry affronted him. They seemed imbued by no holy ardor, no godly exhilaration. They talked of loot, and the fun they would have among the Rochellais after the surrender.
Despite the Cardinal’s casualness, he was much worried. Among the Catholic nobles of his train, he knew there existed astute men who realized that a strong Protestant minority in France guaranteed that the power of the King would not become absolute, and that should that absoluteness finally be obtained, they, themselves, would be curtailed and hampered in the management of their own provinces and estates. He also knew that in some mysterious way provisions had been smuggled into La Rochelle, and he needed to ask no questions from whence they came.
The King’s desire to return to Paris now became stronger than a furtive suggestion. This alarmed the Cardinal. The Queen Mother presided in Paris like a waiting black spider, hoping to enmesh the King and withdraw him from the Cardinal’s influence, and thus obtain once more the old power of which the Cardinal had deprived her. Let the King once return to Paris, and the work of long years would be undone.—He knew, that in his absence, the Queen Mother was surrounded by hating malcontents and enemies who would plot unceasingly to destroy him.
Finally, the King abruptly bade the Cardinal farewell, and returned to Paris. He promised to return after the winter passed, but it was a promise given with a sly sliding of the eyes, and surly pouting of the lips. The Cardinal, overcome with dread and worry, would have followed precipitously, had not Père Joseph been present. But under the fixed glare of those terrible eyes, even his fear dared not betray itself. He was caught in this disgusting debacle whether he wished it or not. His only hope was in the continued insistence of his advisers that La Rochelle could not be taken. He frequently called in the Capuchin to hear these pessimistic reports, hoping that the dread monk might, himself, be convinced.
But the Capuchin looked at Cardinal and advisers and said in a loud and most frightful voice: “It can be taken! Nothing is impregnable, before God! We shall remain.” The Cardinal shrugged, and smiled, but groaned internally. For the first time he had a real desire to smite his old friend very firmly and consign him to hell. But some shame withheld him from announcing that the city could not be taken, and returning posthaste to Paris. He began to curse Madame, the Queen. On such an ignominous venture, jeopardizing himself, he had come at the behest of a miserable Spaniard whose pink and white flesh he could not resist. He had many sour meditations with himself on man’s vulnerability to woman, and most of them were obscene. His former idle scorn and wonder at himself for his weakness in being enmeshed in the ancient trap now became active detestation. With it, the first shaking of his self-confidence came. When might his body not betray him again into such abysmal folly? He could control its achings, but he could not control its itch. This placed him again in the detestable pen with all of the mankind he loathed.
Now, perversely, he began to pity the Rochellais. He felt himself one with them. He had been betrayed by a woman into this ludicrous degradation, and, indirectly, they had been so betrayed by the same woman. He saw himself and them as victims of a silly Spaniard’s nether regions. How many worlds, how many deaths, had disappeared into the bodies of foolish women? he questioned himself. It infuriated him, with appalling disgust, that he was so absurd, so weak, so contemptible, that he could aid in the universal conspiracy, and be caught in it.
His respect and admiration for the Rochellais became almost extreme. He meditated upon the Mayor, the Duchesse, Arsène, and all the others, with surprised pleasure. What ideal sustained them? He, who had no ideals, had found them ridiculous in others, had believed they were pretentious affectations, either the vaporings of fools or sly intriguers. But apparently idealism sustained the Rochellais. It shocked him. Did men actually exist for which some philosophy was bread and honey, and the wine of heaven? He knew that the Rochellais had been seduced with promises of clemency, therefore it was no fear that kept them obstinate within their walls. He knew that they knew that continued resistance would have terrible consequences for them. Yet, they preferred to starve and die rather than surrender. For the first time in his life a dim respect for some element in mankind, unknown in him, began to dawn in his mind.
From his acquaintance with the Capuchin, and others like him, he knew that there was some intoxication in religion which sustained them, made them insensible to suffering. But he knew that the Rochellais did not have this kind of religion. Protestantism, in the majority of the Huguenots, was a cool and liberal thing, more attuned to logic and reason than ecstasy. And logic and reason were usually the first to succumb before assault, despite their vaunted power. What was it, then, that sustained them?
When the thought came to him that some men might be willing to die for the right to think and act as they willed, that there might be a kind of pride in a few men which refused slavery to another man’s ideas, and demanded liberty and honor and enlightenment, not only for themselves, but for others who cared nothing for it, he was astounded. He repudiated the thought. It was not possible! Where lived the man, who, without the intoxication and irrationality of religion and superstition, had the fortitude to believe that freedom was the most precious possession of all men, and was willing to die for it? How could such a man operate steadfastly in a chill and bitter light, not enraptured, not drugged?
The evidence was before him, beyond those scowling battlements that guarded the exhausted and starving city. Despite the traitors, the expedient, the soft and the opportunistic who dwelt among the Rochellais, there were many who believed that the rights of man were the holiest things on earth, beyond chants and churches and altars and an unknowable God. He was more and more astonished. It shook the evidences of a lifetime. It shook the knowledge of men which he had acquired in his long and embittered years. He was compelled to believe that some men were above the beasts of the field, above the love of self, and the thought humbled him.
Now he vowed that when La Rochelle fell, if it did, he would treat the surrendered with all courtesy, all admiration, all wonder, as strange creatures of which he would like to know more, in order to complete his education.
Men had killed and been killed in the name of religion, in a miasma of rapture. They had been drugged, debased creatures, as were all creatures robbed of reason. But how many had died because they had loved other men, and demanded for them the same liberation and reason, the same right to live in peace and knowledge which they demanded for themselves? So few. So very few! A Socrates, here and there, stood like a pillar of light in the black desert of history, which was strewn with the ruins of those who had only hated in the name of dead gods and forgotten deities.
Yet, those pillars had not fallen from heaven. They had been raised by countless dusty hands; they had been born of the sucking muck and slime in which all humanity struggled.
And now some strange passion was born in him that the Rochellais would resist to the death. Should he retire? No, he would not retire! He would observe this humbling, this glorious miracle, to its end. Perhaps, then, the sickness that lived in his flesh and his soul would be relieved, and he might dare hope that all men were not vile. It became a necessity in him to believe this. If he lost this belief, then the remainder of his life must be a thing of evil, of blood and death, of fury and madness and hatred.
He, who never prayed except before an altar, before a multitude, found himself praying that the Rochellais would prefer death to surrender to superstition and slavery. To what God did he pray, who believed in no God? He did not know. But he seemed to pray to a vast and universal spirit, who had a thousand faces, yet had none.