The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [102]
Everything Lorin said was so just that there was nothing to say. If Maurice were merely to exchange a sign with the Tison girl as she walked to the scaffold, he would be announcing his complicity himself for all the world to see.
“Go on, then,” he said to Lorin, “but be careful.”
Lorin smiled, shook Maurice’s hand, and left.
Maurice opened his window and bade him a sad farewell. But before Lorin had turned the corner of the street, Maurice ran back to the window more than once, and each time, as though attracted by a kind of sympathetic magnetism, Lorin turned round to smile at him.
Finally, when Lorin had disappeared around the corner of the quay, Maurice shut the window and lapsed into the kind of somnolence which, in strong natures and nervous dispositions like his, presages great turbulence, resembling as it does the calm before the storm.
He was only drawn out of his reverie, or rather trance, by the officieux, who had been on an errand in the outside world and had returned with that bristling air of a domestic servant bursting to tell his master the news he’s just picked up.
But seeing Maurice preoccupied, he didn’t dare distract him and contented himself with passing back and forth in front of his master, apparently innocently—and without letup.
“What is it, then?” said Maurice cavalierly. “Speak, if you have something to say.”
“Ah, citizen! Another incredible plot, eh?”
Maurice shrugged his shoulders.
“A plot to make your hair stand on end,” continued Agesilaus. “Really!” said Maurice in the tone of a man perfectly accustomed to the thirty or so plots a day that then used to occur.
“Yes, citizen,” said Agesilaus. “It makes you tremble in your bed, it does. Just thinking about it gives good patriots goose bumps.”
“So what sort of plot was it?” asked Maurice.
“The Austrian woman nearly got away.”
“Hmph!” Maurice snorted, starting to get interested.
“It seems,” said Agesilaus, “that the Widow Capet was involved with the Tison girl they’re going to guillotine today. She asked for it, poor thing.”
“And how could the Queen be mixed up with that girl?” asked Maurice, who could feel himself breaking out in a sweat.
“It was all done with a carnation. Imagine, citizen, they passed her the instructions in a carnation!”
“In a carnation! … Who did?”
“Monsieur, the Knight of … wait a sec … You know the name as well as anything.… I never can remember names.… A Knight of Château … Strike! I’m a goose! There are no more châteaux.…1 A Knight of Maison …”
“Maison-Rouge?”
“That’s it!”
“It can’t be.”
“What do you mean, it can’t be? I’m telling you they found a trapdoor, an underground tunnel, coaches.”
“Hold your horses—you haven’t told me a thing yet.”
“Oh, well then, I’ll tell you all about it, then.”
“Get on with it: if it’s a tall tale, at least it’s a good one.”
“No, citizen, it’s not a tall tale, not by a long shot, and the proof is I got it from the citizen porter. The aristocrats dug a mine; this mine started at the rue de la Corderie and went as far as the cellar of the citizeness Plumeau’s canteen, and even she was nearly compromised for complicity, was citizeness Plumeau. You know her, I hope?”
“Yes, I do,” said Maurice, “but go on.”
“Well, the Widow Capet was supposed to get away through this underground tunnel. She already had one foot on the stairs going down, can you imagine! It was citizen Simon who yanked her back by her dress. Hold on, they’re sounding the alarm in town and the summons in the sections. Can you hear the drums over there? They say the
Prussians are at Dammartin and that their reconnaissance is practically at the border.”
In all this barrage of words—some true, some false; some possible, some absurd—Maurice more or less got ahold of the main thread. Everything began with that carnation given to the Queen under his own nose and bought by him from the unfortunate flower girl. That carnation contained the instructions of a