"Indeed I will. On my return to England I will tell Mr. Rose, who decides all things at the Treasury, of the great assistance your family has been to us." Roger gave the promise willingly; the future being a closed book to him, he could not know that he was pledging his support to a man whose financial genius and unshakable faith in Britain would make him second only to Wellington in bringing about the final downfall of Napoleon.
Gusiot and Roger then adjourned to a good inn for a meal. After it, with Bauer's written promise to pay, the Captain set out on his return journey. Roger, now aching in every limb from his many hours in jolting coaches, took a room and went straight to bed.
Next morning, September the 28th, he caught the diligence into Mainz, which was in the hands of a French garrison. There, he hired another travelling coach and, after some trouble, two French-speaking coachmen to drive it. Late in the afternoon he crossed the Rhine, now heading west. On the night of the 30th, the cumulative effect of the jolting forced him to sleep in a bed for the night at Verdun. But without any further break of more than a couple of hours in his journey, he reached the outskirts of Paris soon after midday on October the 2nd.
As the coach drew level with a big rambling building in the Faubourg St. Martin, Roger halted it. Before the Revolution the place had been a convent, but a board attached to its tall wall announced that it was now a depot for army clothing. Having settled up with his two coachmen, Roger picked up his little valise and walked through one of the tall gates, thus giving the men the impression that the depot was his destination. Of its janitor he enquired for an imaginary Citizen Rollo, and the man obligingly sent his son to ask the heads of various departments if they had anyone of that name working under them, with, of course, negative results. Twenty minutes having been occupied in this way Roger walked out to find, as he expected, that he had again freed himself from the possibility of hired drivers gossiping about where he had come from at the inn at which he meant to stay.
Half a mile down the road stood the Porte St. Martin. During the Terror, this gate, and all the others of Paris, had been manned as barriers at which passes had to be shown; but he found that it was now open again to both inward and outward traffic between dawn and sunset Another mile's walk brought him to La Belle Etoile in the Rue de l'Arbe Sec, not far from the Louvre. Going in he found the landlord in his little office, and asked for a room.
To Roger's amusement and satisfaction Maitre Blanchard did not recognize him, and if anyone in Paris was likely to have done so it should have been he; for he had known Roger first as the impecunious
secretary of the Marquis de Rochambeau, seen him mysteriously blossom into a young nobleman who had the entre at Versailles, and later proved a most stalwart friend to him, with the knowledge that he was a secret agent, during the dark days of the Terror.
As they were alone together, and it was during the quiet of the afternoon, Roger laughingly declared himself. The good Norman was overjoyed at seeing him again, and ran to fetch his wife from the kitchen. Both of them fussed over him, Mere Blanchard declared that she would cook him his favourite dish of duck casseroled in red wine for dinner, and her husband promised to produce his best Burgundy and oldest Calvados.
When they escorted him upstairs, most poignant memories flooded back to him, as when last he had lived there he had loved and lost his beautiful Athenals; but, knowing that, they tactfully refrained from giving him his old room.
Two hours later he dined with them in their private parlour, and, during the meal, they gave him the latest news. Paris was once more in a ferment—this time on account of the final decisions taken by the old Convention on the form of the new Constitution. The clauses had been argued with great violence ever since June, when Boissy d'Anglas, a Liberal Deputy who had recently come much to the fore, had put forward the recommendations of a Committee which had been debating the question all through the spring.
The salient points of the Committee's findings were that the executive power must once more be divorced from the legislative, that there should be two chambers instead of one, that the members of both must be owners of property, that universal suffrage should be abolished and that only those who paid taxes should be entitled to a vote.
While these proposals did not deprive the people of any of the real liberties they had won by the Revolution, they were clearly aimed at destroying once and for all the dictatorship of the proletariat and concentrating power in the hands of the middle-classes. In consequence, all the old catch phrases of the Revolution had been revived By the mob orators, and the surviving Jacobins, who still formed a formidable bloc in the Chamber, had fought them tooth and nail.
The re-establishment of an executive independent of the lawmakers was denounced as a move to restore the monarchy or so it had been decided that it should consist of a Directory having five members, one of whom was to retire annually.
The measure for the two Chambers had been agreed: the lower, called the Cinq-Cents, was to have 500 members and to initiate legislation; the upper, called the Conseil des Anciens, was to have 250 members and the power to veto any measures passed by the lower for one year. But the property qualification for election was ruled out by one motion of the Jacobins, and by another they secured a vote to anyone willing to tax themselves to the value of three days’ work.
These brakes upon further reaction had not aroused' much opposition amongst the general public, but the arrangements for the election of members to the two new Chambers had provoked a universal outcry.
As Mr. Pitt had rightly appreciated during his -talk with Roger, a free General Election in France must sweep away at one stroke every ex-Terrorist from the new governing body. Barras, Tallien, Freron and the other Thermidorians who had conspired to bring about Robespierre's fall, and still held the reins of power, had been equally quick to appreciate this, so they had allied themselves with the remaining Jacobins to prevent it To the indignation of the electors, they had forced through a decree by which two thirds of the members of the two new Chambers must be selected from the deputies of the old Convention, leaving the electors only the choice of which individual members they should return.
To the vast majority of the people the Convention stood for murder, arbitrary arrest, the seizure of property, forced loans, and every other form of injustice and tyranny. It had, too, brought France to a state of poverty and general misery undreamed of in the old days of the monarchy. In consequence the idea that it was to be perpetuated under the thin disguise of a new name, by a majority of its members continuing as the rulers of the country, was already causing riots which threatened to develop into a mass movement aimed at overthrowing the government.
Roger was delighted to hear all this, as it showed that the state of popular opinion could not have been more favourable to the Allies' designs, and that if Pichegru could be persuaded to march upon the city there really was every reason to believe that it would fall into his hands like a ripe plum. He then asked about conditions in general, to which Maitre Blanchard replied with a bitter laugh:
"If anything, Monsieur, they are worse than when you left us. Food is scarce, prices high. For an honest silver ecu one can get a purse full of the republican paper money, yet we are forced to accept it; and the streets become ever fuller of poor fellows disabled in the wars begging for a crust to keep the life in their bodies. It has become a popular jest to say: 'Under Robespierre we starved and dared not complain; now we may complain but that will not prevent us from dying of hunger*."