The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [128]
The attitude adopted by the man whose portrait we have just sketched was in the best of taste. Society at the time was split into two classes: the sheep and the wolves. One of them must have frightened the other, since half of society now devoured the other half.
Our ferocious stroller was short in stature; he brandished the cudgel known as a constitution from a dirty black hand. It is true that the hand that was swinging this terrible weapon so wildly would have looked pretty damn dainty to anyone who wanted to amuse themselves by playing the inquisitor to this strange character, a role he himself had arrogated in relation to others. But no one would have dared question a man who looked so terrible.
Indeed, with his getup and his attitude, the man with the cudgel sent shock waves of grave anxiety through certain groups of pencil-pushers in their cubbyholes who were holding forth about politics and the state—which, at the time, was starting to go from bad to worse, or from good to better, depending on whether you were a conservative or a revolutionary. From the corners of their eyes, these brave scribes were carefully scanning the man’s long black beard and his greenish eyes, set deep beneath eyebrows as bushy as brushes; and they shuddered each time the terrible patriot came near them as he paced the entire length of the Hall of Lost Footsteps.
What they were especially terrified of was the fact that, each time they decided to approach him or even to look at him too closely, the man with the cudgel made the flagstones ring with his heavy weapon, which he brought down hard, crashing against stones in the process and dislodging them with a sound now dull and flat, now shrill and resonant.
But it was not only the fine fellows in the booths of whom we have spoken, who are generally known as the rats of the Palais, who experienced the thrill of fear. So did the various individuals coming into the Hall of Lost Footsteps through its wide main door or through one of its narrow vomitoires, who scuttled past as soon as they spotted the man with the cudgel. But he just continued to cross from one end of the room to the other, undeterred, finding at every moment an excuse to set his cudgel ringing against the flagstone floor.
If the scribes had been less frightened and the persons coming and going a bit sharper, they would no doubt have discovered that our patriot, capricious like all eccentric or extreme personalities, seemed to have a distinct preference for certain flagstones; those, for example, located a little way from the right-hand wall and more or less in the middle of the room, which gave out the purest and loudest sounds.
He even wound up concentrating his rage on a mere handful of flagstones, especially those in the center of the room. For a second he even forgot himself enough to stop and measure something like a distance. It is true that this lapse lasted only a second and that the man quickly put back on his face the ferocious scowl that a flash of joy had momentarily replaced.
Almost that same instant, another patriot—in those days everyone wore their political views emblazoned on their brows, or rather on their sleeves—almost at the same instant, as we were saying, another patriot entered by the gallery door and, without in any way seeming to share the general terror inspired by the original occupant, crossed his path with a step more