CHAPTER VI.

THE REVOLUTION IN THE COUNTRY.

Our intention being to temporarily abandon the fortunes of our high and

mighty characters to follow those of more humble but perhaps no less

engaging heroes, we take up with Sebastian Gilbert whom his father,

immediately after his release from the Bastile, confided to a young

peasant named Ange Pitou, foster-brother of the youth, and despatched

them to the latter’s birthplace, Villers Cotterets.

It was eighteen leagues from the city, and Gilbert might have sent them

down by stage-coach or his own carriage; but he feared isolation for the

son of the mesmerists’ victim, and nothing so isolates a traveler as a

closed carriage.

Ange Pitou had accepted the trust with pride at the choice of the King’s

honorary physician. He travelled tranquilly, passing through villages

trembling with the thrill from the shock of the events at Paris as it

was the commencement of August when the pair left town.

Besides Pitou had kept a helmet and a sabre picked up on the battlefield

where he had shown himself more brave than he had expected. One does not

help in the taking of a Bastile without preserving some heroic touch in

his bearing subsequently.

Moreover he had become something of an orator; he had studied the

Classics and he had heard the many speeches of the period, scattered out

of the City Hall, in the mobs, during lulls in the street fights.

Furnished with these powerful forces, added to by a pair of ponderous

fists, plenty of broad grins, and a most interesting appetite for

loiters-on who did not have to pay the bill, Pitou journeyed most

pleasantly. For those inquisitive in political matters, he told the

news, inventing what he had not heard, Paris having a knack that way

which he had picked up.

As Sebastian ate little and spoke hardly at all, everybody admired

Pitou’s vigorous paternal care.

They went through Haramont, the little village where the mother of one

and the nurse of the other had died and was laid in earth.

Her living home, sold by Pitou’s Aunt Angelique, her sister-in-law, had

been razed by the new owner, and a black cat snarled at the young men

from the wall built round the garden.

But nothing was changed at the burying-ground; the grass had so grown

that the chances were that the young peasant could not find his mother’s

grave. Luckily he knew it by a slip of weeping willow, which he had

planted; while the grass was growing it had grown also and had become in

a few years a tolerable tree.

Ange walked directly to it, and the pair said their prayers under the

lithe branches which Pitou took in his arms as they were his mother’s

tresses.

Nobody noticed them as all the country folk were in the field and none

seeing Pitou would have recognized him in his dragoon’s helmet and with

the sword and belt.

At five in the afternoon they reached their destination.

While Pitou had been away from Haramont three years, it was only as many

weeks since he quitted Villers Cotterets, so that it was simple enough

that he should be recognized at the latter place.

The two visitors were reported to have gone to the back door of Father

Fortier’s academy for young gentlemen where Pitou had been educated with

Sebastian, and where the latter was to resume his studies.

A crowd collected at the front door where they thought Pitou would come

forth, as they wanted to see him in the soldier’s appurtenances.

After giving the doctor’s letter and money for the schooling to Abbé

Fortier’s sister, the priest being out for a walk with the pupils, Pitou

left the house, cocking his helmet quite dashingly on the side of his

head.

Sebastian’s chagrin at parting was softened by Ange Pitou’s promise to

see him often. Pitou was like those big, lubberly Newfoundland dogs who

sometimes weary you with their fawning, but usually disarm you by their

jolly good humor.

The score of people outside the door thought that as Pitou was in battle

array he had seen the fights in Paris and they wanted to have news.

He gave it with majesty; telling how he and Farmer Billet, their

neighbor, had taken the Bastile and set Dr. Gilbert free. They had

learnt something in the Gazettes but no newspaper can equal an

eye-witness who can be questioned and will reply. And the obliging

fellow did reply and explain and at such length that in an hour, one of

the listeners suddenly remarked that he was flagging and said:

“But our dear Pitou is tired, and here we are keeping him on his legs,

when he ought to go home, to his Aunt Angelique’s. The poor old girl

will be delighted to see him again.”

“I am not tired but hungry,” returned the other. “I am never tired but I

am always sharpset.”

Before this plain way of putting it, the throng broke up to let Pitou

go through. Followed by some more curious than the rest, he proceeded to

his father’s sister’s house.

It was a cottage where he would have been starved to death by the pious

old humbug of an old maid, but for his poaching in the woods for

something that they could eat while the superfluity was sold by her to

have the cash in augmentation of a very pretty hoard the miser kept in a

chair cushion.

As the door was fastened, from the old lady being out gossiping, and

Pitou declared that an aunt should never shut out a loving nephew, he

drew his great sabre and opened the lock with it as it were an oyster,

to the admiration of the boys.

Pitou entered the familiar cottage with a bland smile, and went straight

up to the cupboard where the food was kept. He used in his boyish days

to ogle the crust and the hunk of cheese with the wish to have magical

powers to conjure them out into his mouth.

Now he was a man: he went up to the safe, opened it, opened also his

pocket-knife, and taking out a loaf, cut off a slice which might weigh a

fair two pounds.

He seemed to hear Aunt Angelique snarl at him, but it was only the creak

of the door hinges.

In former times, the old fraud used to whine about poverty and palm him

off with cheap cheese and few flavors. But since he had left she got up

little delicacies of value which lasted her a week, such as stewed beef

smothered in carrots and onions; baked mutton with potatoes as large as

melons; or calves-foot, decked with pickled shallots; or a giant omelet

sprinkled with parsley or dotted with slices of fat pork of which one

sufficed for a meal even when she had an appetite.

Pitou was in luck. He lighted on a day when Aunt Angelique had cooked an

old rooster in rice, so long that the bones had quitted the flesh and

the latter was almost tender. It was basking in a deep dish, black

outside but glossy and attractive within. The coxcomb stuck up in the

midst like Ceuta in Gibraltar Straits.

Pitou had been so spoilt by the good living at Paris that he never even

reflected that he had never seen such magnificence in his relative’s

house.

He had his hunk of bread in his right hand: he seized the baking dish

in his left and held it by the grip of his thumb in the grease. But at

this moment it seemed to him that a shadow clouded the doorway.

He turned round, grinning, for he had one of those characters which let

their happiness be painted on their faces.

The shadow was cast by Angelique Pitou, drier, sourer, bonier, not

bonnier, and more mean than ever.

Formerly, at this sight, Pitou would have dropped the bread and dish and

fled.

But he was altered. His helmet and sword had not more changed his aspect

than his mind was changed by frequenting the society of the

revolutionary lights of the capital.

Far from fleeing, he went up to her and opening his arms he embraced her

so that his hands, holding the knife, the bread and the dish, crossed

behind her skeleton back.

“It is poor Pitou,” he said in accomplishing this act of nepotism.

She feared that he was trying to stifle her because she had caught him

red-handed in plundering her store. Literally, she did not breathe

freely until she was released from this perillous clasp.

She was horrified that he did not express any emotion over his prize and

at his sitting in the best chair: previously he would have perched

himself on the edge of a stool or the broken chair. Thus easily lodged

he set to demolishing the baked fowl. In a few minutes the pattern of

the dish began to appear clean at the bottom as the rocks and sand on

the seashore when the tide goes out.

In her frightful perplexity she endeavored to scream but the ogre smiled

so bewitchingly that the scream died away on her prim lips.

She smiled, without any effect on him, and then turned to weeping. This

annoyed the devourer a little but did not hinder his eating.

“How good you are to weep with joy at my return,” he said. “I thank you,

my kind aunt.”

Evidently the Revolution had transmogrified this lad.

Having tucked away three fourths of the bird he left a little of the

Indian grain at the end of the dish, saying:

“You are fond of rice, my dear auntie: and, besides, it is good for your

poor teeth.”

At this attention, taken for a bitter jest, Angelique nearly suffocated.

She sprang upon Pitou and snatched the lightened platter from his hand,

with an oath which would not have been out of place in the mouth of an

old soldier.

“Bewailing the rooster, aunt?” he sighed.

“The rogue--I believe he is chaffing me,” cried the old prude.

“Aunt,” returned the other, rising majestically, “my intention was to

pay you. I have money. I will come and board with you, if you please,

only I reserve the right to make up the bill of fare. As for this snack,

suppose we put the lot at six cents, four of the fowl and two of bread.”

“Six? when the meat is worth eight alone and the bread four,” cried the

woman.

“But you did not buy the bird--I know the old acquaintance by his nine

years comb. I stole him for you from under his mother and by the same

token, you flogged me because I did not steal enough corn to feed him.

But I begged the grain from Miss Catherine Billet; as I procured the

bird and the food, I had a lien on him, as the lawyers say. I have only

been eating my own property.”

“Out of this house,” she gasped, almost losing her voice while she tried

to pulverize him with her gaze.

Pitou remarked with satisfaction that he could not have swallowed one

grain more of rice.

“Aunt, you are a bad relative,” he said loftily. “I wanted you to show

yourself as of old, spiteful and avaricious. But I am not going to have

it said that I eat my way without paying.”

He stood on the threshold and called out with a voice which was not only

heard by the starers without but by anybody within five hundred paces:

“I call these honest folk for witnesses, that I have come from Paris

afoot, after having taken the Bastile. I was hungered and tired, and I

have sat down under my only relation’s roof, and eaten, but my keep is

thrown up at me, and I am driven away pitilessly!”

He infused so much pathos in this exordium that the hearers began to

murmur against the old maid.

“I want you to bear witness that she is turning from her door a poor

wayfarer who has tramped nineteen leagues afoot; an honest lad, honored

with the trust of Farmer Billet and Dr. Gilbert; who has brought Master

Sebastian Gilbert here to Father Fortier’s; a conqueror of the Bastile,

a friend of Mayor Bailly and General Lafayette.”

The murmuring increased.

“And I am not a beggar,” he pursued, “for when I am accused of having a

bite of bread, I am ready to meet the score, as proof of which I plank

down this silver bit--in payment of what I have eaten at my own folk’s.”

He drew a silver crown from his pocket with a flourish, and tossed it on

the table under the eyes of all, whence it bounced into the dish and

buried itself in the rice. This last act finished the mercenary aunt;

she hung her head under the universal reprobation displayed in a

prolonged groan. Twenty arms were opened towards Pitou, who went forth,

shaking the dust off his brogans, and disappeared, escorted by a mob

eager to offer hospitality to a captor of the Bastile, and

boon-companion of General Lafayette.