He called for his valet, and allowed himself quietly
to be put to bed.
One brief hour had transformed a child into a woman.
A dangerous transformation when the brain is overburdened
with emotions, when the nerves are overstrung and
the heart full to breaking.
For the moment, however, the childlike nature reasserted
itself for the last time, for Juliette, sobbing, had
fled out of the room, to the privacy of her own apartment,
and thrown herself passionately into the arms of kind
old Petronelle.
It would have been very difficult to say why Citizen
Deroulede was quite so popular as he was. Still
more difficult would it have been to state the reason
why he remained immune from the prosecutions, which
were being conducted at the rate of several scores
a day, now against the moderate Gironde, anon against
the fanatic Mountain, until the whole of France was
transformed into one gigantic prison, that daily fed
the guillotine.
But Deroulede remained unscathed. Even Merlin’s
law of the suspect had so far failed to touch him.
And when, last July, the murder of Marat brought an
entire holocaust of victims to the guillotine—from
Adam Lux, who would have put up a statue in honour
of Charlotte Corday, with the inscription: “Greater
than Brutus”, to Charlier, who would have had
her publicly tortured and burned at the stake for her
crime—Deroulede alone said nothing, and
was allowed to remain silent.
The most seething time of that seething revolution.
No one knew in the morning if his head would still
be on his own shoulders in the evening, or if it would
be held up by Citizen Samson the headsman, for the
sansculottes of Paris to see.
Yet Deroulede was allowed to go his own way.
Marat once said of him: “Il n’est
pas dangereux.” The phrase had been taken
up. Within the precincts of the National Convention,
Marat was still looked upon as the great protagonist
of Liberty, a martyr to his own convictions carried
to the extreme, to squalor and dirt, to the downward
levelling of man to what is the lowest type in humanity.
And his sayings were still treasured up: even
the Girondins did not dare to attack his memory.
Dead Marat was more powerful than his living presentment
had been.
And he had said that Deroulede was not dangerous.
Not dangerous to Republicanism, to liberty, to that
downward, levelling process, the tearing down of old
tradidions, and the annihilation of past pretensions.
Deroulede had once been very rich. He had had
sufficient prudence to give away in good time that
which, undoubtedly, would have been taken away from
him later on.
But when he gave willingly, at a time when France
needed it most, and before she had learned how to
help herself to what she wanted.
And somehow, in this instance, France had not forgotten:
an invisible fortress seemed to surround Citizen Deroulede
and keep his enemies at bay. They were few, but
they existed. The National Convention trusted
him. “He was not dangerous” to them.
The people looked upon him as one of themselves, who
gave whilst he had something to give. Who can
gauge that most elusive of all things: Popularity?
