And now dawn many days of love and peace and plenty for Admiral Panl Jones, days in the midst of friends, glad days made sumptuous by a beautiful woman, who is a king’s daughter crowned with a wealth of red-gold hair. He has his business, too, and embarks in speculation; wherein he shows himself as much a sailor of finance as of the sea. The imperial Catherine refuses to lose him; but pays to the last like an Empress, bidding him prolong his vacation while he will. He grows rich. He has twelve thousand pounds in the bank; while in America, Holland, Denmark, Belgium and England his interests flourish. He sells his plantation by the Rappahannock for twenty-five hundred dollars—less than a dollar an acre; for he says that he has no more heart to own slaves, and the plantation cannot be worked without them.
The little happy cottage in the Rue Vivienne grows small; neither is it magnificent enough for his Aimee, of whom each day he grows more proud and fond. So he removes, bag and baggage, to a mansion in the Rue Tournon. There the rooms are grand, ceilings tall, fireplaces hospitably wide.
The wide fireplaces will do for winter; just now he swings a hammock in the back garden, which is thick-sown of trees and made pleasant by a plushy green May carpet of grass. Here he lolls and reads and receives his friends. For the careful Aimee counsels rest, and much staying at home; because he is a long shot from a hale man, having been broken with that fever in the West Indies, and in no wise restored by the mists and the miasmas of the Dnieper marshes.
Through the summer the back garden is filled with chairs, and the chairs are filled by friends. In the autumn, and later when winter descends with its frosts, the chairs and the incumbent friends gather in a semicircle about the wide flame-filled crackling fireplaces. There be times when the wine passes; and the freighted mahogany sideboards discover that they have destinies beyond the ornamental.
French politics bubbles and then boils; Paris is split by faction. Mirabeau controls the Assembly; Lafayette has the army under his hand—a weak, vacillating hand! These two are of the Moderates.
Admiral Paul Jones, coolly neutral in what sentiments go shaking the hour, has admirers in the parties. They come to him, and talk with him, and drink his wines in the shade of the back garden, or by the opulent fireplaces. Robespierre and Danton, as well as Mirabeau and Lafayette, are there. Also, Bertrand Barère, who boasts that he is not French but Iberian, one whose forbears came in with Hannibal. Later, Barère will preach an open-air sermon on the “Life and Deeds of Admiral Paul Jones.” Just now in the Assembly he makes ferocious speeches, garnished of savage expletives culled from the language of the Basques.
Warmest among friends of Admiral Paul Jones is the Thetford corset-maker Tom Paine, with his encarmined nose and love of freedom. Also Gouverneur Morris, who has succeeded Mr. Jefferson as America’s Minister in France, comes often to the Rue Tournon. The pair are with him every day; and because all three like politics, and no two of them share the same views, dispute is deep. Aimee of the red-gold hair takes no part in these discussions, but sits watching her “Paul” with eyes of adoration, directing the servants, with a motion of the hand, to have a care that the debaters do not voice their beliefs over empty glasses.
Admiral Paul Jones, while a republican, gives his sympathies to the king, in whom there is much weakness, but no evil.
“They must not kill the king!” says he.
“And why not?” demands Tom Paine, whose bosom distills bitterness, and who holds there are no good kings save dead kings. “Has France no Cromwell? We are both born Englishmen, Paul; our own people ere this have killed a king.”
“Tom,” cries Admiral Paul Jones, heatedly,
“Cromwell and England should not be cited as precedents here. King Louis is no Charles; and, as for Cromwell, there isn’t the raw material in all France to make a Cromwell.”
Gouverneur Morris says nothing, but sips his wine; remembering that, as the minister of a foreign nation, he should bear no part in French politics.
The Parisian rabble insult the king, and Lafayette, in command of the military about the Tuileries, sadly lacks decision. Then comes the “Day of Daggers;” the poor king, advised by the irresolute Lafayette, yields to the mob, and the assembled notables are disarmed. The anger of Admiral Paul Jones is extreme. He breaks forth to his friend Tom Paine:
“Up to this time I’ve been able to find reasons for the king’s gentleness; but to-day’s action was not gentle, it was weak. I pity the man—beset as he is by situations to which he is unequal. Lafayette cannot long restrain the sinister forces that confront him. He has neither the head nor the heart nor the hand for it. This is a time for grapeshot. I only wish that I might be in command of those thirty cannon parked about the palace, and have with me, even for a day, my old war-dogs of the Ranger and the Richard. Believe me, I should offer the mob convincing reasons in support of conservatism and justice; I should teach it forbearance at the muzzles of my guns.”
“But the rabble might in its turn teach you,” retorts Tom Paine, with a republican grin.
“Bah!” he exclaims, snapping contemptuous fingers. “They of the mob are but sheep masquerading as tigers. One whiff of grapeshot, and they would disappear.” Then he continues, thoughtfully: “Their saddest trait is their levity. They are ridiculous even in their patriotism. Their emblems, representative of the grand sentiments they profess, are as childish as the language in which they proclaim them is fantastic. There is the red cap! Borrowed............