Doom.
WHILE THE TERRIBLE scene which we have just described was taking place between Balsamo and the Five Masters, nothing apparently had changed in the rest of the house. The old man had seen Balsamo enter his apartment and bear away Lorenza’s corpse, and this new demonstration had recalled him to what was passing around him.
But when he saw Balsamo take up the dead body and descend with it into the lower rooms, he fancied it was the last and eternal adieu of this man whose heart he had broken, and fear descended on his soul with an overwhelming force, which, for him who had done all to avoid death, doubled the horror of the grave.
Not knowing for what purpose Balsamo had left him, nor whither he was going, he began to call out:
“Acharat! Acharat!”
It was the name his pupil had borne in childhood, and he hoped it would have retained its influence over the man.
But Balsamo continued to descend. Having touched the ground, he even forgot to make the trap reascend, and disappeared in the corridor.
“Ah!” cried Althotas, “see what man is — a blind, ungrateful animal! Return, Acharat, return! Ah! you prefer the ridiculous object called a woman to the perfection of humanity which I represent! You prefer a fragment of life to immortality!
“But no!” he exclaimed after a moment’s pause; “the wretch has deceived his master — he has betrayed my confidence like a vile robber; he feared that I should live because I surpass him so much in science; he wanted to inherit the laborious work I had nearly concluded; he laid a trap for me, his master and benefactor! Oh, Acharat!”
And gradually the old man’s anger was aroused, his cheeks were dyed with a hectic tinge, his half-closed eyes seemed to glow with the gloomy brightness of those phosphorescent lights which sacrilegious children place in the cavities of a human skull. Then he cried:
“Return, Acharat, return! Look to yourself! You know that I have conjurations which evoke fire and raise up supernatural spirits! I have evoked Satan — him whom the magi called Phegor, in the mountains of Gad — and Satan was forced to leave his bottomless pit and appear before me! I have conferred with the seven angels who ministered to God’s anger upon the same mountain where Moses received the ten commandments! By my will alone I have kindled the great tripod with its seven flames which Trajan stole from the Jews! Take care, Acharat, take care!”’
But there was no reply.
Then his brain became more and more clouded.
“Do you not see, wretch,” said he, in a choking voice, “that death is about to seize me as it would the meanest mortal? Listen, Acharat! you may return; I will do you no harm. Return; I renounce the fire; you need not fear the evil spirit, nor the seven avenging angels. I renounce vengeance, and yet I could strike you with such terror that you would become an idiot and cold as marble, for I can stop the circulation of the blood. Come back, then, Acharat; I will do you no harm, but, on the contrary, I can do you much good. Acharat, instead of abandoning me, watch over my life, and you shall have all my treasures and all my secrets. Let me live, Acharat, that I may teach them to you. See, see!”
And with gleaming eyes and trembling fingers he pointed to the numerous objects, papers, and rolls scattered through the vast apartment. Then he waited, collecting all his fast-failing faculties to listen.
“Ah, you come not!” he cried. “You think I shall die thus, and by this murder — for you are murdering me — everything will belong to you! Madman! were you even capable of reading the manuscripts which I alone am able to decipher — were the spirit even to grant you my wisdom for a lifetime of one, two, or three centuries, to make use of the materials I have gathered — you shall not inherit them! No, no, a thousand times no! Return, Acharat, return for a moment, were it only to behold the ruin of this whole house — were it only to contemplate the beautiful spectacle I am preparing for you! Acharat! Acharat! Acharat!”
There was no answer, for Balsamo was during this time replying to the accusation of the Five Masters by showing them the mutilated body of Lorenza. The cries of the deserted old man grew louder and louder; despair redoubled his strength, and his hoarse yellings, reverberating in the long corridors, spread terror afar, like the roaring of a tiger who has broken his chain or forced the bars of his cage.
“Ah, you do not come!” shrieked Althotas; “you despise me! you calculate upon my weakness! Well, you shall see! Fire! fire! fire!”
He articulated these cries with such vehemence that Balsamo, now freed from his terrified visitors, was roused by them from the depth of his despair. He took Lorenza’s corpse in his arms, reascended the staircase, laid the dead body upon the sofa where two hours previously it had reposed in sleep, and, mounting upon the trap, he suddenly appeared before Althotas.
“Ah! at last!” cried the old man, with savage joy. “You were afraid! you saw I could revenge myself, and you came! You did well to come, for in another moment I should have set this chamber on fire!”
Balsamo looked at him, shrugged his shoulders slightly, but did not deign to reply.
“I am athirst!” cried Althotas, “I am athirst! Give me drink, Acharat!”
Balsamo made no reply; he did not move; he looked at the dying man as if he would not lose an atom of his agony.
“ Do you hear me?” howled Althotas; “do you hear me?”
The same silence, the same immobility on the part of the gloomy spectator.
“Do you hear me, Acharat?” vociferated the old man, almost tearing his throat in his efforts to give emphasis to this last burst of rage; “water! give me water!”
Althotas’s features were rapidly decomposing.
There was no longer fire in his looks, but only an unearthly glare; the blood no longer coursed beneath his sunken and cadaverous cheek; motion and life were almost dead within him. His long sinewy arms, in which he had carried Lorenza like a child, were raised, but inert and powerless as the membranes of a polypus. His fury had worn out the feeble spark which despair had for a moment revived in him.
“Ah!” said he, “ah! you think I do not die quickly enough! You mean to make me die of thirst! You gloat over my treasures and my manuscripts with longing eyes! Ah! you think you have them already! Wait, wait!”
And, with an expiring effort, Althotas took a small bottle from beneath the cushions of the arm chair and uncorked it. At the contact with the air, a liquid flame burst from the glass vessel, and Althotas, like some potent magician, shook this flame around him.
Instantly the manuscripts piled round the old man’s armchair, the books scattered over the room, the rolls of paper disinterred with so much trouble from the pyramids of Cheops and the subterranean depths of Herculaneum, took fire with the rapidity of gunpowder. A sheet of flame overspread the marble slab, and seemed to Balsamo’s eyes like one of those flaming circles of hell of which Dante sings.
Althotas no doubt expected that Balsamo would rush amid the flames to save this valuable inheritance which the old man was annihilating along with himself, but he was mistaken. Balsamo did not stir, but stood calm and isolated upon the trap-door, so that the fire could not reach him.
The flames wrapped Althotas in their embrace, but, instead of terrifying him, it seemed as it the old man found himself once more in his proper element, and that, like the salamanders sculptured on our ancient castles, the fire caressed instead of consuming him.
Balsamo still stood gazing at him. The fire had reached the woodwork, and completely surrounded the old man; it roared around the feet of the massive oaken chair on which he was seated, and, what was most strange, though it was already consuming the lower part of his body, he did not seem to feel it.
On the contrary, at the contact with the seemingly purifying element, the dying man’s muscles seemed gradually to distend, and an indescribable serenity overspread his features like a mask. Isolated from his body at this last hour, the old prophet on his car of fire seemed ready to wing his way aloft. The mind, all-powerful in its last moments, forgot its attendant matter, and, sure of having nothing more to expect below, it stretched ardently upward to those higher spheres to which the fire seemed to bear it.
At this instant Althotas’s eyes, which at the first reflection of the flames seemed to have been re-endowed with life, gazed vaguely and abstractedly at some point in space which was neither heaven nor earth. They looked as if they would pierce the horizon, calm and resigned, analyzing all sensation, listening to all pain, while, with his last breath on earth, the old magician muttered, in a hollow voice, his adieux to power, life, and hope.
“Ah!” said he, “I die without regret. I have possessed everything on earth, and have known all; I have had all power which is granted to a human creature; I had almost reached immortality!”
Balsamo uttered a sardonic laugh whose gloomy echo arrested the old man’s attention. Through the flames, which surrounded him as with a veil, he cast a look of savage majesty upon his pupil.
“You are right,” said he; “one thing I had not foreseen — God!”
Then, as if this mighty word had uprooted his whole soul, Althotas fell back upon his chair. He had given up to God the last breath, which he had hoped to wrest from him.
Balsamo heaved a sigh, and, without endeavoring to save anything from the precious pile upon which this second Zoroaster had stretched himself to die, he again descended to Lorenza, and touched the spring of the trap, which readjusted itself in the ceiling, veiling from his sight the immense furnace, which roared like the crater of a volcano.
During the whole night the fire roared above Balsamo’s head like a whirlwind, without his making an effort either to extinguish it or to fly. Stretched beside Lorenza’s body he was insensible to all danger; but, contrary to his expectations, when the fire had devoured all, and laid bare the vaulted walls of stone, annihilating all the valuable contents, it extinguished itself, and Balsamo heard its last howlings, which, like those of Althotas, gradually died away in plaints and sighs.
[After the spirit-stirring scenes just narrated, in which the principal personages of the tale vanish from the stage, we have thought it better to hurry over the succeeding chapters, in which the book is brought to an end, merely giving the reader the following succinct account of their contents, as the effect of them when read at full length has been on ourselves, and we doubt not would be on the public, to detract from and weaken the interest which was wound up to so high a pitch by the preceding portion of the narrative. — Editor.]
From the deathlike lethargy into which Andree had been plunged by Balsamo’s neglect to arouse her from the magnetic sleep, she at length recovered, but so utterly prostrate both in mind and body, as to be wholly unfit for the performance of her duties at court. She therefore asked for, and obtained from the dauphiness, permission to retire into a convent, and the kind ness of her royal mistress procured for her admission among the Carmelite sisters of St. Denis, presided over by Madame Louise of France, whom we have already met in these pages.
This, it may readily be imagined, gave a deathblow both to the unrighteous hopes of the Baron de Taverney, her father, and to the noble aspirations of her brother Philip. Frowned upon by the kings and the scoff of the sycophantic courtiers, among the foremost of whom was his old friend, the Duke de Richelieu, Taverney — after a stormy interview with his son, whom he disowned and cast off to seek his fortunes where he best might — slunk back, despair and every evil passion boiling within his breast, to his patrimonial den, where, it is to be presumed, he found amid his misfortunes such consolation from his exalted philosophy as it was well calculated to afford.
Philip, heartbroken by his sister’s sufferings and the malicious whispers of the corrupt court, decided upon sailing for America, at that time the land of promise for ardent admirers and followers of liberty. His example was imitated by Gilbert, who had now also nothing to detain him in France, where his high-flown and romantic hopes were for ever blasted, and they both took shipping in the same vessel from Havre.
Of Balsamo little more is said, and that little does not enlighten us as to his future fate. Weakened both in bodily health and in his influence over the secret brotherhood, he vegetated rather than lived in his mansion of the Rue St. Claude, to reappear, it is presumed, amid the stormy scenes of the French revolution.
Having thus given a rapid resume of the intermediate events, we come at once to the
EPILOGUE.
THE NINTH OF MAY.
ON THE NINTH OF May, 1774, at eight o’clock in the evening, Versailles presented a most curious and interesting spectacle.
From the first day of the month the king, Louis XV., attacked with a malady the serious nature of which his physicians at first dared not confess to him, kept his couch, and now began anxiously to consult the countenances of those who surrounded him, to discover in them some reflection of the truth or some ray of hope.
The physician Bordeu had pronounced the king suffering from an attack of smallpox of the most malignant nature, and the physician La Martiniere, who had agreed with his colleague as to the nature of the king’s complaint, gave it as his opinion that his majesty should be informed of the real state of the case, in order that, both spiritually and temporally, as a king and as a Christian, he should take measures for his own safety and that of his kingdom.”
“His Most Christian Majesty,” said he, “should have extreme unction administered to him.”
La Martiniere represented the party of the dauphin — the opposition. Bordeu asserted that the bare mention of the serious nature of the disease would kill the king, and said that for his part he would not be a party to such regicide.
Bordeu represented Madame Dubarry’s party.
In fact, to call in the aid of the Church to the king was to expel the favorite. When religion enters at one door, it is full time for Satan to make his exit by the other.
In the meantime, during all these intestine divisions of the faculty, of the royal family, and of the different parties of the court, the disease took quiet possession of the aged, corrupt, and worn-out frame of the king, and set up such a strong position, that neither remedies nor prescriptions could dislodge it.
From the first symptoms of the attack. Louis beheld his couch surrounded by his two daughters, the favorite, and the courtiers whom he especially delighted to honor. They still laughed and stood firm by each other.
All at once the austere and ominous countenance of Madame Louise of France appeared at Versailles. She had quitted her cell to give to her father, in her turn, the cares and consolations he so much required.
She entered, pale and stern as a statue of Fate. She was no longer a daughter to a father, a sister to her fellow-sisters; she rather resembled those ancient prophetesses who in the evil day of adversity poured in the startled ears of kings the boding cry, “Woe! Woe! Woe!”
She fell upon Versailles like a thundershock at the very hour when it was Madame Dubarry’s custom to visit the king, who kissed her white hands, and pressed them like some healing medicament to his aching brow and burning cheeks.
At her sight all fled. The sisters, trembling, sought refuge in a neighboring apartment. Madame Dubarry bent the knee, and hastened to those which she occupied; the privileged courtiers retreated in disorder to the antechambers; the two physicians alone remained standing by the fireside.
“My daughter!” murmured the king, opening his eyes, heavy with pain and fever.
“Yes, sire,” said the princess, “your daughter.”
“And you come—”
“To remind you of God!”
The king raised himself in an upright posture and attempted to smile.
“For you have forgotten God,” resumed Madame Louise.
“I!”
“And I wish to recall Him to your thoughts.”
“My daughter! I am not so near death, I trust, that your exhortations need be so very urgent. My illness is very slight — a slow fever, attended with some inflammation.”
“Your malady, sire,” interrupted the princess, “is that which, according to etiquette, should summon around your majesty’s couch all the great prelates of the kingdom. When a member of the royal family is attacked with small-pox, the rites of the Church should be administered without loss of time.”
“Madame!” exclaimed the king, greatly agitated, and becoming deadly pale, “what is that you say?”
“Madame!” broke in the terrified physicians.
“I repeat,” continued the princess, “that your majesty is attacked with the small-pox.”
The king uttered a cry.
“The physicians did not tell me so,” replied he.
“They had not the courage. But I look forward to another kingdom for your majesty than the kingdom of France. Draw near to God, sire, and solemnly review your past life.”
“The small-pox!” muttered Louis; “a fatal disease! — Bordeu! La Martiniere! — can it be true?”
The two practitioners hung their heads.
“Then I am lost!” said the king, more and more terrified.
“All diseases can be cured, sire,” said Bordeu, taking the initiative, “especially when the patient preserves his composure of mind.”
“God gives peace to the mind and health to the body,” replied the princess.
“Madame!” said Bordeu, boldly, although in a low voice, “you are killing the king!”
The princess deigned no reply. She approached the sick monarch, and taking his hand, which she covered with kisses:
“Break with the past, sire,” said she, “and give an example to your people. No one warned you; you ran the risk of perishing eternally. Promise solemnly to live a Christian life if you are spared — die like a Christian, if God calls you hence!”
As she concluded, she imprinted a second kiss on the royal hand, and, with slow step, took her way through the antechambers. There she let her long black veil fall over her face, descended the staircase with a grave and majestic air, and entered her carriage, leaving behind her a stupefaction and terror which cannot be described.
The king could not rouse his spirits, except by dint of questioning his physicians, who replied in terms of courtly flattery.
“I do not wish,” said he, “that the scene of Metz with the Duchesse de Chateauroux should be re-enacted here. Send for Madame d’Aiguillon, and request her to take Madame Dubarry with her to Rueil.”
This order was equivalent to an expulsion. Bordeu attempted to remonstrate, but the king ordered him to be silent. Bordeu, moreover, saw his colleague ready to report all that passed to the dauphin, and, well aware what would be the issue of the king’s malady, he did not persist, but, quitting the royal chamber, he proceeded to acquaint Madame Dubarry with the blow which had just fallen on her fortunes.
The countess, terrified at the ominous and insulting expression which she saw already pictured on every face around her, hastened to withdraw. In an hour she was without the walls of Versailles, seated beside the Duchesse d’Aiguillon, who, like a trustworthy and grateful friend, was taking the disgraced favorite to her chateau of Rueil, which had descended to her from the great Richelieu.
Bordeu, on his side, shut the door of the king’s chamber against all the royal family, under , pretext of contagion. Louis’s apartment was thenceforward walled up; no one might enter but Religion and Death.
The king had the last rites of the church administered to him that same day, and this news soon spread through Paris, where the disgrace of the favorite was already known, and circulated from mouth to mouth.
All the court hastened to pay their respects to the dauphin, who closed his doors and refused to see any one.
But the following day the king was better, and sent the Duke d’Aiguillon to carry his compliments to Madame Dubarry. This day was the 9th May, 1774.
The court deserted the pavilion occupied by the dauphin, and flocked in such crowds to Rueil, where the favorite was residing, that since the banishment of M. de Choiseul to Chanteloup such a string of carriages had never been witnessed.
Things were in this position, therefore; would the king live, and Madame Dubarry still remain queen? — or would the king die, and Madame Dubarry sink to the condition of an infamous and execrable courtesan?”
This was why Versailles, on the evening of the 9th May, in the year 1774, presented such a curious and interesting spectacle.
On the Place d’Armes, before the palace, several groups had formed in front of the railing, who, with sympathetic air, seemed most anxious to hear the news.
They were citizens of Versailles or Paris, and every now and then, with all the politeness imaginable, they questioned the gardes-du-corps, who were pacing slowly up and down the Court of Honor with their hands behind their backs, respecting the king’s health.
Gradually these groups dispersed. The inhabitants of Paris took their seats in the pataches or stage-coaches to return peaceably to their own homes; while those of Versailles, sure of having the earliest news from the fountain-head, also retired to their several dwellings.
No one was to be seen in the streets but the patrols of the watch, who performed their duty a little more quietly than usual, and that gigantic world called the Palace of Versailles became by degrees shrouded in darkness and silence, like that greater world which contained it.
At the angle of the street bordered with trees which extends in front of the palace, a man advanced in years was seated on a stone bench overshadowed by the already leafy boughs of the horse chestnuts, with his expressive and poetic features turned toward the chateau, leaning with both hands on his cane, and supporting his chin on his hands.
He was nevertheless an old man, bent by age and ill-health, but his eye still sparkled with something of its youthful fire, and his thoughts glowed even more brightly than his eyes.
He was absorbed in melancholy contemplation, and did not perceive a second personage who, after peeping curiously through the iron railing and questioning the gardes-du-corps, crossed the esplanade in a diagonal direction, and advanced straight toward the bench, with the intention of seating himself upon it.
This personage was a young man with projecting cheekbones, low forehead, aquiline nose slightly bent to one side, and a sardonic smile. While advancing toward the stone bench he chuckled sneeringly, although alone, seeming to reply by this manifestation to some secret thought.
When within three paces of the bench, he perceived the old man and paused, scanning him with his oblique and stealthy glance, although evidently fearing to let his purpose be seen.
“You are enjoying the fresh air, I presume, sir?” said he, approaching him with an abrupt movement. The old man raised his head. “Ha!” exclaimed the new-comer, “it is my illustrious master!”
“And you are my young practitioner?” said the old man.
“Will you permit me to take a seat beside you, sir?”
“Most willingly.” And the old man made room on the bench beside him.
“It appears that the king is doing better?” said the young man. “The people rejoice.” And he burst a second time into his sneering laugh. The old man made no reply. “The whole day long the carriages have been rolling from Paris to Rueil, and from Rueil to Versailles. The Countess Dubarry will marry the king as soon as his health is re-established!” And he burst into a louder laugh than before.
Again the old man made no reply. “Pardon me if I laugh at fate,” continued the young man, with a gesture of nervous impatience, “but every good Frenchman, look you, loves his king, and my king is better to-day.”
“Do not jest thus on such a subject, sir,” said the old man gently. “The death of a man is always a misfortune for some one, and the death of a king is frequently a great misfortune for all.”
“Even the death of Louis XV.?” interrupted the young man, in a tone of irony. “Oh, my dear master, a distinguished philosopher like you to sustain such a proposition! I know all the energy and skill of your paradoxes, but I cannot compliment you on this one.” The old man shook his head. “And, besides,” added the new-comer, “why think of the king’s death? Who speaks of such an event? The king has the small-pox; well, we all know that complaint. The king has beside him Bordeu and La Martiniere, who are skillful men. Oh, I will wager a trifle, my dear master, that Louis the Well-Beloved will escape this turn! Only this time the French people do not suffocate themselves in churches putting up vows for him, as on the occasion of his former illness. Mark me, everything grows antiquated and is abandoned!”
“Silence!” said the old man, shuddering; “silence! for I tell you you are speaking of a man over whom at this moment the destroying angel of God hovers.”
His young companion, surprised at this strange language, looked at the speaker, whose eyes had never quitted the facade of the chateau.
“Then you have more positive intelligence?” inquired he.
“Look!” said the old man, pointing with his finger to one of the windows of the palace; “what do you behold yonder?”
“A window lighted up — is that what you mean?”
“Yes; but lighted in what manner?”
“By a wax candle placed in a little lantern.”
“Precisely.”
“Well?”“
“Well, young man, do you know what the flame of that wax-light represents?”
“No, sir.”
“It represents the life of the king.” The young man looked more fixedly at his aged companion, as if to be certain that he was in his perfect senses.
“A friend of mine, M. de Jussieu,” continued the old man, “has placed that waxlight there, which will burn as long as the king is alive.”
“It is a signal, then?”
“A signal which Louis XV.’s successor devours with his eyes from behind some neighboring curtain. This signal, which shall warn the ambitious of the dawn of a new reign, informs a poor philosopher like myself of the instant when the breath of the Almighty sweeps away, at the same moment, an age and a human existence.”
The young man shuddered in his turn, and moved closer to his companion.
“Oh,” said the aged philosopher, “mark well this night, young man! Behold what clouds and tempests it bears in its murky bosom! The morning which will succeed it I shall witness no doubt, for I am not yet old enough to abandon hope of seeing the morrow; but a reign will commence on that morrow which you will see to its close, and which contains mysteries which I cannot hope to be a spectator of. It is not, therefore, without interest that I watch yonder trembling flame, whose signification I have just explained to you.”’
“True, my master,” murmured the young man, “most true.”
“Louis XIV. reigned seventy-three years,” continued the old man. “How many will Louis XVI. reign?”
“Ah!” exclaimed the younger of the two, pointing to the window, which had just become shrouded in darkness.
“The king is dead!” said the old man, rising with a sort of terror.
And both kept silence for some minutes.
Suddenly a chariot, drawn by eight fiery horses, started at full gallop from the courtyard of the palace. Two outriders preceded it, each holding a torch in his hand.
In the chariot were the dauphin, Marie Antoinette, and Madame Elizabeth, the sister of the king. The flame of the torches threw a gloomy light on their pale features. The carriage passed close to the two men, within ten paces of the bench from which they had risen.
“Long live King Louis XVI.! Long live the queen!” shouted the young man in a loud, harsh voice, as if he meant to insult this new-born ma jest v instead of saluting it.
The dauphin bowed; the queen showed her face at the window, sad and severe. The carriage dashed on and disappeared.
“My dear M. Rousseau,” said the younger of the two spectators, “then is our friend Mademoiselle Dubarry a widow.”
“To-morrow she will be exiled,” said his aged companion. “Adieu. M. Marat!”
THE END