• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 698 0

and nothing but the truth when he told the mysterious stranger of the day before that his name was Maurice Lindey and that he lived in the rue Roule. He could have added that he was a child of that deminobility to which those belonging to the legal profession—the Robe1—had been promoted. For the past two hundred years, his ancestors had invariably belonged to the parliamentary opposition that had made the names Molé and Maupeou famous. His father, Lindey senior, had spent his life attacking despotism but when, suddenly, on 14 July 1789, the Bastille fell to the hands of the people, he died of shock and horror to see despotism replaced by a militant liberty. His death left his only son independent of fortune and republican by inclination.

The Revolution that followed hot on the heels of this momentous event thus found Maurice in the prime of that vigor and virility that are only right in an athlete ready and raring to enter the race, with republican education supplemented by fervent participation in the clubs and a heady dose of all the pamphlets of the times. God knows how many pamphlets Maurice must have read. A profound and reasoned contempt for hierarchy, philosophical pondering of the elements that compose the social body, absolute negation of the very notion of a nobility entailing anything other than a personal quality, impartial appreciation of the past, keenness for new ideas, sympathy for the people matched with the most aristocratic of temperaments—such was the nature, not of our hero, but of the newspaper portrait on which we have drawn to produce him.

Physically, Maurice Lindey was between twenty-five and twenty-six years old; he stood six feet tall and was as muscular as Hercules, and startlingly good-looking, with those peculiarly French looks that derive from a specific race of Franks that include a pure and noble forehead, blue eyes, wavy chestnut hair, ruddy cheeks, and a good set of pearly teeth.

That’s the portrait of the man; and now for the status of the citizen. Maurice was not rich, but he was at least independent and bore a name that was not only respected but, more important, popular. Maurice was known for his liberal education and for his even more liberal stance, so it was only natural that he had more or less placed himself at the head of a party composed of all the young patriots of the bourgeoisie. You could no doubt argue that, next to the sans culottes, Maurice could look a bit of a wimp—“lukewarm”—and, next to the sectionaries, a bit of a fop. But he was forgiven his lukewarmness by the sans culottes by smashing to smithereens the most gnarled of cudgels as though they were fragile reeds; and he was forgiven his elegance by the sectionaries by sending them reeling twenty feet away with a well-aimed smack between the eyes if those eyes had looked at Maurice in a way he didn’t like.

As for the physical, the moral, and the social combined, Maurice had taken part in the storming of the Bastille; he had joined in the expedition to Versailles on the fifth and sixth of October 1789;2 he had fought like a lion on the tenth of August, and on that memorable day, to give him his due, he had killed as many patriots3 as Swiss Guards,4 for he was no more prepared to put up with the assassin in the carmagnole than the enemy of the Republic in the red livery.

It was Maurice who, exhorting the defenders of the Tuileries to give themselves up and prevent bloodshed, threw himself across the mouth of a cannon that a Parisian artilleryman was about to fire; it was Maurice who was first to enter the Louvre, through a window, despite the fusillade of fifty Swiss Guards and as many gentlemen behind the lines, and who already, by the time he saw the signals of capitulation, had torn open more than ten uniforms with his saber; it was Maurice who then, seeing his friends massacring at will prisoners who were throwing down their arms and holding out their hands and pleading for mercy and begging for their lives, began to furiously hack at his friends—all of which had helped to forge a reputation worthy of the great