"He held out his hand to me, and from the manner in which I pressed it, he felt I was his friend. At this same moment a hoarse, heavy, dull noise made the dishes and the glasses, the window-panes and the women, tremble; it was the rumble of the carts. Their sound was known, as is that of thunder to the ear, which has once heard it; it was not that of ordinary wheels it had something of the grating of rusted chains, and the noise of the last spadeful of earth, which is cast upon coffins. Their sound gave me a sensation of pain in the soles of my feet.

"Eh, eat, citizenesses, eat,' said the rude voice of the female semé.

"There was neither movement nor reply. Our arms remained in the positions in which they were arrested by this fatal roll. We resembled those smothered families of Pompeii and Herculaneum found in the attitudes wherein death surprised them. Dame Semé multiplied vainly her knives, and forks, and plates, nothing stirred, so great was the astonishment this cruelty caused. To have given them a day of meeting, to have permitted the embraces and endearments of some few hours, to have allowed them to forget the sadness, the miseries of their solitary prisons, to have let them enjoy confidence, taste friendship, wit, and even a little love, and this that all might see and hear the death of each! Oh, it was too much! it was truly a sport suited to hungry byenas or raving Jacobins. The great refectory doors opened noisily and vomited three commissaries, attired in long dirty coats, top boots, and red scarfs, followed by a new troop of bandits in red caps, and having long pikes for arms. All these rushed forward with joyous shouts and clapping of hands as to the opening of some grand exhibition. That which they saw stopped them short, and the victims yet by their demeanour disconcerted their assassins, for surprise had lasted but for an instant, and the excess of their scorn came to impart new strength to all. They felt themselves so superior to their enemies, that it was almost a joy to them, and all eyes rested with firmness and even curiosity on the commissary who advanced before the rest, a paper in his hand, to read its contents to them. It was a calling over of names. As soon as one was pronounced, two men came forward and removed from his place the designated prisoner. He was given over to the gend'armes, on horseback

The accusation bore that he had conspired within the prison against the people, and projected the assassination of representatives, and the members of the comite du salut public.

"The first person accused was a woman of eighty, the Abbess of Montmartre, Madame de Montmorency, she rose with difficulty, and when she was upright saluted all the guests with a quiet smile. Those who were nearest kissed her hand. No one wept, for at this epoch the sight of blood made eyes dry. She went forth saying, May God forgive them, for they know not what they do!' A deep silence reigned throughout the hall. We heard from without the ferocious shouts which announced that she appeared before the mob, and stones came striking the windows and the walls, flung no doubt at the first issuing prisoner. In the midst of the noise I even distinguished the report of a gun. Sometimes the gendarmerie was compelled to resistance to preserve to the prisoners twenty-four hours' existence. The calling over continued. The second name was that of a young man three and twenty years old, Monsieur de Coatarel, as well as I can recollect his name, accused of having an emigrant son, who bore arms against his country. The accused was not even married. He burst into a fit of laughter when this was read, shook his friends by the hand and departed. The same cries sounded without. The same silence reigned at the fatal table, whence its guests were dragged one by one; they waited at their post as soldiers wait the cannon. Each time a prisoner went out his plate was removed; and those who remained approached their new neighbours, smiling bitterly. André Chenier had remained standing by Madame de Saint Aignan, and I was near them. As it happens that on board a ship in danger of wreck, the crew crowds spontaneously round the man known to be first in genius and firmness, so the prisoners had, of their own accord, gathered round this young man. He stood with folded arms and eyes raised to heaven, as if asking himself if it were possible that heaven should suffer such things, unless indeed heaven were empty. Mademoiselle de Coigny saw, at each summons, one of her guardians retire, and found herself left by degrees almost alone at the other end of the hall. Then she came, following the edge of the table which was growing deserted, and leaning on that edge she arrived where we were, and seated herself in our shadow like a poor abandoned child as she was. Her noble countenance had pre

served its lofty expression, but nature in her gave way, and her feeble arms trembled as did her legs beneath her weight. The kind Madame de St. Aignan held out her hand, she threw herself into her arms, and burst into tears in spite of efforts to the contrary. The harsh and unpitying voice of the the commissary continued the summons. This man prolonged the torture by his affectation of pronouncing slowly, and holding as if suspended the Christian names, syllable by syllable, letting at last the family name drop suddenly, like an axe on the neck. He accompanied the passage of the prisoner by an oath which was a signal for the prolonged hootings outside. He was red with wine, and seemed not over firm on his feet. While this man read, I remarked a woman's head which advanced on his right hand in the crowd, till it was almost under his arm, and far above this head the long face of a man who read with ease over them. It was Rose on one side, and on the other my artilleryman, Blaireau. Rose appeared to me joyous and curious like the market woman whose arm she held. I detested her profoundly. As for Blaireau he had the somniferous air which was common to him; and his artillery uniform seemed to me to waken great respect for him among the piked and red-capped mob which surrounded him. Thelist which the commissary held was composed of several ill-scrawled papers, which the worthy agent decyphered no better than they were written. Blaireau came zealously forward as to assist, and politely took his hat which incommoded him. I fancied that at the same moment I perceived Rose pick up some paper from the ground; but the motion was prompt, and the shadows so deep in this part of the refectory, that I was not sure of what I saw. The reading was continued. Men, women, children, passed from us like shadows. The table was almost empty and grew enormous and of sinister aspect from all these absent guests. Thirty-five had gone. fifteen who remained scattered singly or two and two with eight or ten places left between them, resembled trees forgotten in the felling of a forest. All at once the commissary was silent. He was at the end of his list-he breathed. I for my part a sigh of relief. André Chenier said, 'Go on, I am here!" "

SO

The

André is however saved this time by the interference of Rose and Blaireau. We want room for the scenes which follow, introducing us to Robespierre and Saint Just. As for the fine commentary on Joseph de Maistre,

and his theories justifying murder, as well as for the interview between the two triumvirs with André's father and brothers, they are of deep and thrilling interest, as is the chapter which contains the fall of Robespierre ; but we prefer quoting a part of that which precedes it, as it closes André's story:

64

My first action was to hide Joseph Chenier. No one, then, notwithstanding the terror, refused the shelter of his roof to a menaced head. I found twenty houses. I chose one for Marie Joseph. He allowed himself to be led to it crying like a child. Concealed by day, he visited by night all the representatives who were his friends to give them courage. He was heart-broken, and spoke only to accelerate the fall of Robespierre, of Saint Just, and of Couthon. existed on this idea. Like him, I gave up to it my whole soul; like him, I hid myself. I was everywhere excepting at home. When Joseph Chenier went to the convention, he entered and went forth surrounded by friends and representatives whom none dared lay hands

on.

He

Once outside, he was made to disappear; and even the troop of spies belonging to Robespierre, the most subtle flight of locusts which ever descended on Paris, like a plague, failed to find trace of him. The head of André Chenier depended on a question of time it was, which should ripen earliest the wrath of Robespierre, or that of the conspirators? Even from the first night which followed this scene of ill augur, (from the 5th to the 6th of Thermidor,) we visited all those, since named Thermidoriens-all, from Tallien to Barres, from Lecointre to Vadier. We united them intentionally without calling them together. Each was decided, but all were not so. I returned saddened. This was the result of what I had seen. The republic

was

mined and countermined. The mine of Robespierre was sprung from the Hotel de Ville; the countermine of Tallien from the Tuileries. The day on which the miners should meet would be that of the explosion; but there was union on the side of Robespierre, division among the conventionels who waited his attack. Our efforts, urging them to take the initiative, led only this night, and that which succeeded it (from the 6th to the 7th of Thermidor) to timid and partial conferences. The Jacobins had long been ready. convention stayed for the first blow, The 7th, when day broke-it was to this we had arrived-Paris felt the earth shake under her. As is always the

The

case here, the coming event might be breathed in the streets; the places were cumbered by earnest speakers; the doors yawned wide; the windows questioned the streets. We could hear nothing from Saint Lazare. I had shown myself there, and the gates had been flung against me with fury. I was well nigh arrested; I had lost the day in vain inquiries. About six o'clock in the evening groups hastily traversed the public places' in all directions. Agitated men flung a report among these knots of townsmen, and fled; they said, the sections are about to take up arms; the convention conspires, the Jacobins conspire; the commune suspends the decrees of the convention; the artillerymen have just passed by. Some one shouted important petition from the Jacobins to the convention in favour of the people!' Sometimes a whole street ran and fled without know.. ing why, as if swept by the wind. At these times children fell, women screamed, shutters were closed, and then silence reigned again for a short time, till a new fear came to set all in motion. The sun was veiled as by a coming storm; the heat was overpowering. I roamed round my house on the Place de la Revolution, and remembering suddenly that after two nights' absence, I should be least looked for there, I crossed the arcade and entered. All the doors stood open; the porters were in the streets. I walked up stairs and went in alone. I found all as I had left it; my books scattered about and rather dusty; my windows open. I rested myself a moment near that which looked on the Place. Still pursuing my reflections, I gazed from the height I occupied on those sad and eternallyreigning Tuileries, with their green chesnut trees, and the long house on the long terrace des Feuillans; the trees of the Champs Elysées all white with dust, the 'Place' blackened with men's heads, and in the centre, one before the other, two things of painted wood: the statue of Liberty and the Guillotine. evening was sultry. As the sun hid more behind the trees and beneath the heavy blue cloud as he set, so, more also he shot forth oblique and broken rays on the red caps and the black hatsmelancholy gleams which gave to this agitated mob the aspect of a sombre sea spotted by flakes of blood. The confused voices no longer reached to the height of my windows, the nearest to the roof, but as the voice of the waves of ocean; and the distant roll of thunder completed this gloomy illusion. On a sudden these murmurs increased prodigiously, and I saw heads and arms all turned towards the Boulevards, which

This

An

I could not see. Something which came from thence excited cries and hootings, rush and struggle. I stooped forward vainly; nothing appeared, and the cries did not cease. An unconquerable desire of seeing made me forget my situation. I was going out, but I heard on the stairs a quarrel which soon made me close my door. Some men insisted on coming up, and the porter, convinced of my absence, showed them by his double set of keys that I no longer inhabited the house. Two fresh voices were added, and said it was true; that all had been searched an hour before. I had arrived in time; they descended with great regret. By their imprecations I knew whence these men were sent to me. Per force I returned sadly to my window, a prisoner within my own walls. The heavy sound increased from minute to minute, and a louder noise approached the Place,' like the roar of cannon amid a fusillade. immense wave of people, armed with pikes, burst into the vast sea of the unarmed multitude on the Place, and I saw at last the cause of this sinister tumult. It was a cart, but a cart painted red and laden with more than eighty living forms; they were all standing, pressed one against the other. All ages, all figures, thus bound as in a sheaf; all had the head bare; and there were seen white locks and bald heads, and little fair ones, reaching to the waist, white robes, dresses of peasants, officers, priests, and citizens; I even perceived two women who held their child to the breast, and nursed it to the last, as if to bequeath to their son all their milk, their blood, their life, about to be taken from them. I have told you before it was called a Tournée.' The load was so great that three horses could not drag it; besides, and this caused the noise, at every step the cart was stopped, and the people sent forth loud cries; the horses backed one on the other, and the cart was as if besieged; then from above their guards the condemned stretched their arms forth to their friends. It was like an overladen boat which is about to sink, and men on shore strive to save. At each effort made by gendarmes and sans "culottes to march forward, the people uttered a mighty cry, and forced back the procession with chest and shoulders, interposing between them and their sentence its tardy and terrible veto, and cried with a long, confused, ever-growing voice, which issued at once from the Seine, the bridges, the quays, the avenues, the trees, the curbstones, and the pavement-No, no, no! Before each of these strong tides of men, the cart was balanced on its wheels like a vessel

6

on its anchors, and almost raised from the ground with all its load. I hoped to see it overturned. My heart beat violently. I leaned my whole body from the window, giddy with the grandeur of the spectacle. I did not breathe-my whole soul, my whole life were in my eyes. In the feverish excitement it caused, it seemed to me that heaven and earth were actors in it. From time to time came from the cloud a faint flash of lightning, like a signal. The black face of the Tuileries became red and bloody, the two great squares of trees bent themselves backward as in horror; then the people groaned, and after their grand voice had spoken, that of the cloud rejoined and groaned mournfully. The shadows commenced to spread, that of the storm before that of the night, a thick dust rose above the heads, and often hid from my eyes all the picture. I could not withdraw my gaze from this shaken cart. I stretched my arms to it from above; I uttered cries unheard; I invoked the people. I called to them courage,' and then I looked if heaven would not do somewhat. I exclaimed. Yet three days! three days more. Oh, Providence! oh, Destiny! powers ever unknown. God, spirits, masters, eternal, if you hear, stop them yet three days. The cart went on still, step by step, slowly, shaken, stopped, but alas, still forward. The troops increased around it. Between the guillotine and liberty shone a mass of bayonets. There seemed the harbour where the vessel was expected. The people, weary of blood, the irritated people, murmured more, but acted less than in the beginning. I trembled, my teeth chattered. With my naked eye I had seen the ensemble of the picture; I took a glass to distinguish the details. The cart was already at a distance, far before me. I recognised, notwithstanding, a man in a grey coat, his hands behind his back. I do not know whether they were bound. 1 could not doubt that it was André Chenier. The cart stopped again. There was a fight. I saw a man in a red cap ascend the platform of the guillotine and arrange a basket. My sight grew dim. I quitted my glass to wipe it and my eyes. The general aspect of the place changed as the struggle changed ground. Every step gained by the horses seemed to the people a defeat sustained. The cries were less furious and more mournful. The crowd increased notwithstanding, and impeded the advance more than ever, by numbers more than by resistance. I took up the glass again, and I saw the unhappy condemned, who surmounted, by their whole height, the heads of the multitude. At

Comme un dernier rayon, comme un dernier zephire,

Anime la fin d'un beau jour,

Au pied de l'echafaud, J'essaie encore ma lyre,
Peutêtre est ce bientôt mon tour.'

Suddenly, a violent movement he made
forced me to quit my glass to look at
the whole extent of the Place, where
I no longer heard a cry. The rush of
the multitude had all at once become
retrograde. The quays so covered, so
crowded, grew empty. The masses
were cut in groups, the groups in fami-
lies, the families in individuals. At
the extremities of the Place, they ran
through a heavy dust to seek shelter.
The women covered their own heads
and their children with the skirts of
their gowns. The anger was extin-
guished. It rained. Whoever knows
Paris will comprehend this. For me, I
saw it. I have since seen it again on
grave and great occasions. To tumul-
tuous cries, to oaths, to long vocife-
rations, succeeded plaintive murmurs,
which seemed a sinister adieu, slow and
rare exclamations whose base notes still
lengthened and lower, expressed the
abandonment of resistance, and groaned
over their feebleness. The humbled na-
tion bent its head and rolled on in flocks,
between a false statue, a liberty which
was but the image of an image, and a
real scaffold, dyed with its best blood.
Those who hastened, still did so to es-
cape or to see. No one strove to pre-
vent. The executioners seized on the
moment. The sea was calm, and this
hideous bark arrived safe in port. The
guillotine raised her arm. At this mo-
ment no voice, no movement, was heard
or seen on the whole extent of the
Place. The clear and monotonous sound
of a heavy rain was the sole which made
itself heard, like that of an immense
watering-pot. Broad rays of water
spread before my eyes and furrowed
the space. My legs trembled. I was
obliged to kneel. There I gazed and
listened breathlessly. The rain was
yet sufficiently transparent to allow me,
by help of my glass, to distinguish the
colour of the dress which rose between
the posts.
I could also see a white
space between the arm and the block,
and when a shadow filled up this inter-

val, I closed my eyes. A loud cry from the spectators warned me to re-open them. Thirty-two times I stopped my head thus; saying aloud a despairing prayer, which no human ear will ever hear, and only I could have conceived. After the thirty-third cry, I saw the grey figure upright. This time I resolved to do honour to the courage of his genius by having courage to see all his death. I arose-The head rolled, and what he had there flowed forth with the blood."

Turn we now to the prescription of the Docteur Noir, after the close of these tales addressed to Stello: "To hold separate the poetical and political existence." "To fulfil his mission alone and free." These are its most important articles, and the motives for the advice, given at length, form one of those essays we have referred to before, and of which we can give only a few detached sentences, showing but a portion of the reasoning. He recommends the first, because "a century may produce three poets for a crowd of logicians". because, "it was more difficult to organize yon small book than yonder weighty government. To hold power in the grasp has always reduced itself to the action of handling idiots and circumstances, and these circumstances and idiots balloted together bring about unforeseen but inevitable chances to which the greatest have confessed they owed the fairest portion of their fame"-because, "the first among men will always be those who of a sheet of paper, a canvass, a stone, a sound, make things imperishable." "Immortal works are produced to dupe death by causing our ideas to survive our bodies; therefore, write such if you can, and be sure that if there be inscribed there an idea, or only a word, useful to the advance of civilization, and which you have let drop, like a plume from your wing, there will be found men enow to gather it up and trade on it and put it in practice, even to satiety so let them! The application of ideas to things is a loss of time to the creators of thought."

If he bids "to follow the vocation alone and free," it is because "in assemblies, public bodies, companies, schools, academies, and all which resembles them, intriguing mediocrity

arrives by degrees at domination, by means of a rude and wholly material activity, and that sort of cunning to which enlarged and generous minds cannot descend." He adds elsewhere, "the poet has a curse on his life, and a blessing on his name. Follow your vocation-your kingdom is not of this world, but of that which shall be when your eyes are closed."

As yet Alfred de Vigny has followed the advice he thus, through his docteur noir, addressed to the great and useful writer he has held aloof from the political stage the smoke and the glare of its stage lights; and struggles for transient, influence, and disputes for vulgar interests, have not come near to break on his studies, like street cries rousing from a holy dream. As yet he does not even belong to the academy; a fact which aids in proving true the sentence quoted above; indeed, to judge from those who are, and those who are not within its walls, the French academy bids fair to become fellow to the yearly exhibition for painters—the masters prefer being outside. The drama of Chatterton was brought out in February 1835; it was, in various ways, an innovation; for it had little action and much thought, and the interest of the heroine lay most in her purity; yet the audience listened, and wept in breathless attention and sympathy; and this time at least bestowed its indignation, not on the tiresome virtue which discomfits some interesting vice, but on the hard adorer of Mammon, who pushes despised merit aside, and on the cold and careless who pass it by. It is a fact unprecedented, we believe, in the annals of the Theatre Français, that after each of the first fifteen representations, the actors were recalled and covered with flowers flung to them from the boxes. Monsieur de Vigny had said that he would have framed a simpler plot if possible. His intention was not to adhere to the exact circumstances of Chatterton's life, but to show the man of genius crushed by a state of society wholly material. Alas! in the annals of our authors he might have found many examples more. Kitty Bell is the young wife of John Bell, the monied manufacturer; the old mild quaker is her friend, the fair children her consolation, Chatterton her solitary lodger. Bowed under the rule of her hard husband, we feel that