(1) The general belief that the Duchesse de Trélan, thrown into prison when Mirabel was sacked, had shared the terrible fate of the Princesse de Lamballe, though it was unfounded, had a large amount of probability to justify it. Valentine de Saint-Chamans had come very near to being cut down by the weapons of the killers in that shambles of a street outside La Force on the 3rd of September, 1792—so near it indeed that her entire disappearance from that hour was assigned to that cause and to no other.
But she had been saved on the very brink by a man almost unknown to her, acting under a stimulus not commonly as powerful in this world as it might be—gratitude.
Years and years before the Duchesse de Trélan had discovered in Paris, precariously situated, a former steward of Mirabel, had pensioned him from her own purse, and had continued the pension after his death to his granddaughter, Suzon. Suzon in due time wedded one Alcibiade Tessier, a young watchmaker with ideas—the Duchesse, who was fond of her for her own sake, contributing her dowry. After that Valentine lost sight of her protégée, and for some years before 1792 she had seen nothing of Mme Tessier, so that no one had less idea than she in what good stead her own past generosity was to stand her.
The first intimation of it was the sudden appearance, at one o’clock in the afternoon of that third of September, in the little courtyard of the prison of La Petite Force—where only an hour and a half earlier Mme de Trélan had seen and spoken to the Princesse de Lamballe, now gone to her doom—of a man whom she seemed to have seen before. This man approached her, looked her in the face, said with meaning, “Do not be afraid! I shall be there!” and walked rapidly away again. It was Alcibiade Tessier, now an important member of his “section,” and, as such, decorated with a badge of authority commanding respect, though meaningless to the Duchesse de Trélan.
Sure enough, when a little before three o’clock several men came to take her before that mock tribunal in the adjoining prison of La Force, he was at their head. Still Mme de Trélan had not recognised him, and thought his remark merely ferocious irony. But a measure of enlightenment as to his aim, at any rate, came when she found him confidently taking the words out of her mouth, and answering for her to those questions that she only half understood. It was he who at the end of that rapid interrogatory caught her arm and, raising it, said, “See, she cries ‘Vive la nation’?”; it was he who, on the pronouncement of acquittal, went out in front of her through the door of death into the swimming Rue des Balais, he who, with some more under his orders, hurried her up the length of that swirling red gutter into the worse carnage of the Rue St. Antoine, and finally he who, when one of the male furies there, with dripping sabre, tried to get her to kneel on the hillock of corpses and shreds of corpses to swear fealty to the nation, pushed her by, covering her face with his hat, asseverating that she was not a friend of the Lamballe, and that she had already sworn.
But it was only when she sank down, half dead, in Alcibiade’s little shop in the Rue de Seine that the Duchesse de Trélan began fully to realise the harvest which she was reaping. In the Tessiers’ attic, where, more or less indisposed, she was hidden for a month, she knew it better still. For Suzon had quite decided that her benefactress was to instal herself there for the present, until she could safely get away, and she and Alcibiade so wrought upon Mme de Trélan that in mid-October she openly appeared as Suzon’s aunt from the provinces, arriving one evening, for the benefit of the neighbours, with a trunk—Suzon’s.
She was then able to attempt to communicate with her émigré husband, and wrote a very guarded letter addressed to his last direction in London. Suzon, who was anxious for her to join him, contrived to get it conveyed somehow across the Channel. Cautiously as (for the Tessiers’ sake) the letter was worded, it showed that Mme de Trélan was waiting for a lead to join the Duc in England. No answer came. The obvious explanation of the silence was that her letter had never reached him. That was quite to be expected. After Christmas she wrote again; fresh difficulties of conveyance, fresh uncertainties as to its arrival. And again no reply.
“The reason is,” Suzon would say, “that M. le Duc is coming himself to take you away. One of these days he will turn up in the Rue de Seine, you will see!”
But Valentine knew—indeed, hoped—that that was out of the question. In that early spring of 1793, after the King’s execution, how could a proscribed noble possibly get into Paris without incurring the most terrible risks? She was haunted sometimes by the thought that he had come, and had paid the penalty. That thought made her hesitate too about fleeing on her own account to England—always supposing such a course were possible without compromising the Tessiers—for her husband might meanwhile be searching for her in Paris, since she had not dared (again for their sakes) to give her address plainly. She would wait a little longer.
And then, in that April, the bloody thundercloud of the Terror broke over France. Ere the first spattering red drops had swelled to the stream which was to run so full Valentine found herself once more in prison—this time in a much obscurer place of detention than La Force. A piece of her underclothing, incautiously sent to be washed out of the house, was found to bear a compromising mark; the washerwoman denounced this widow from the provinces who had a coronet on her shift. The marvel was that the Tessiers themselves were not included in this catastrophe, but they put up such a good defence, Alcibiade’s character for patriotism stood so high, and Suzon affirmed so stoutly that the garment in question belonged to a ci-devant in the country whom her aunt had once served as maid, that in the end Valentine was imprisoned as a suspect merely. And as a suspect she remained in her mean captivity for more than a year, unrecognised—for there were none of her acquaintance there—and forgotten.
The Gironde fell, Marat was murdered, the Queen executed, Vendée defeated. The year 1793 closed; the next began; Hébert’s, then Danton’s head went the way of the rest, and at last the long suspense was ended, when on a May morning of 1794 the widow Vidal stood before Dumas and his assessors in their plumed hats, in that hall of so many anguishes in the Palais de Justice, to find acquittal on an unforeseen ground. There was no evidence against her; the zealous washerwoman was dead, and even Fouquier-Tinville himself, demanding his quota of heads a day, was intent on nobler quarry than this country widow. Her trial only lasted ten minutes. One was quickly lost or saved just then.
The fishwives on the other side of the barrier acclaimed the acquittal, little guessing whom they were applauding. Some of them insisted on accompanying the Duchesse home—to all the home she had. Henceforward she was more or less sacred. But never, now, while that orgy of blood and denunciation lasted, could her real identity be suffered to reveal itself, or the Tessiers would be lost indeed. Moreover, Mme de Trélan was herself beginning to be uncertain of it. And, though her position was improved by her official acquittal, the months of prison and privation had left their mark on her character in a kind of inertia and indifference very foreign to her nature. In common with many others in those days of superhuman strain, the love of life was running low in her. Existence was almost a burden. She was ill, indeed, for months. Then at last, in that stiflingly hot and cloudless Thermidor, the spell of terror was snapped, and the guillotine came back from its ceaseless work in the east of Paris to the centre for Maximilien Robespierre himself.
In the reaction Valentine roused herself to write again to her husband, more because she felt she owed it to him than because of any great wish to do so, or of any hope that he would receive the letter. She did seriously contemplate leaving France, or at least leaving Paris, but the days went on, and she took no steps. . . . It was better to think that Gaston was dead. She did think it at last. If he were not, she was too proud to make an appearance in the world of emigration as a deserted wife. And the few family ties she, an only child and early orphaned, had possessed were all broken now, by nature or violence. She was happy, too, in a sense, with the Tessiers, who had risked so much for her, and to whom, since Thermidor, her presence was no longer a menace—though she was still very careful not to betray herself. She began to earn money by embroidery, which she had always done exquisitely; she began, too, to enjoy the new sensation of earning. And when in ’97 Alcibiade died very suddenly, and his widow, keeping a journeyman to attend to the clocks and watches, turned half the shop into a lingerie, Mme de Trélan’s skill helped to support the new venture.
So—unbelievably when she looked back at their added months—five years, almost, had passed since her release, and she was still in the Rue de Seine, having reached an indifference to outward circumstances which might, on the surface, have earned the commendation accorded by spiritual direction to “detachment.” Yet this state of mind was not in the main the fruit of the astonishing change in her fortunes, of captivity and indignities or suspense—not even the fruit of her husband’s strange silence. It sprang from a tree of older growth than these, though no doubt these conditions, and especially the last, had ripened it; it was the lees of a cup more deadening, even, than that which the Revolution had set to her lips—the cup which she had begun to drink years before, when her heart had been slowly starved amid the luxury and state of Mirabel.
(2)
The marriage of Geneviève-Armande-Marie-Valentine de Fondragon with Gaston-Henri-Hippolyte-Gabriel-Eléonor de Saint-Chamans, Duc de Trélan, had been arranged, as often happened, when th............