The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel | Page 3

named Jean Paul Marat. You have heard of him, Monsieur?"
The other nodded.
"You know him, perhaps," she continued, "for what he is: the most
cruel and revengeful of men. A few years ago he threw up his lucrative
appointment as Court physician to Monseigneur le Comte d'Artois, and
gave up the profession of medicine for that of journalist and politician.
Politician! Heaven help him! He belongs to the most bloodthirsty
section of revolutionary brigands. His creed is pillage, murder, and
revenge; and he chooses to declare that it is I who, by rejecting his love,
drove him to these foul extremities. May God forgive him that

abominable lie! The evil we do, Monsieur, is within us; it does not
come from circumstance. I, in the meanwhile, was a happy wife. My
husband, M. de Lannoy, who was an officer in the army, idolised me.
We had one child, a boy--"
She paused, with another catch in her throat. Then she resumed, with
calmness that, in view of the tale she told, sounded strangely weird:
"In June last year my child was stolen from me--stolen by Marat in
hideous revenge for the supposed wrong which I had done him. The
details of that execrable outrage are of no importance. I was decoyed
from home one day through the agency of a forged message purporting
to come from a very dear friend whom I knew to be in grave trouble at
the time. Oh! the whole thing was thoroughly well thought out, I can
assure you!" she continued, with a harsh laugh which ended in a
heartrending sob. "The forged message, the suborned servant, the
threats of terrible reprisals if anyone in the village gave me the slightest
warning or clue. When the whole miserable business was accomplished,
I was just like a trapped animal inside a cage, held captive by
immovable bars of obstinate silence and cruel indifference. No one
would help me. No one ostensibly knew anything; no one had seen
anything, heard anything. The child was gone! My servants, the people
in the village--some of whom I could have sworn were true and
sympathetic--only shrugged their shoulders. 'Que voulez-vous,
Madame? Children of bourgeois as well as of aristos were often taken
up by the State to be brought up as true patriots and no longer
pampered like so many lap-dogs.'
"Three days later I received a letter from that inhuman monster, Jean
Paul Marat. He told me that he had taken my child away from me, not
from any idea of revenge for my disdain in the past, but from a spirit of
pure patriotism. My boy, he said, should not be brought up with the
same ideas of bourgeois effeteness and love of luxury which had
discgraced the nation for centuries. No! he should be reared amongst
men who had realised the true value of fraternity and equality and the
ideal of complete liberty for the individual to lead his own life,
unfettered by senseless prejudicesof education and refinement. Which

means, Monsieur," the poor woman went on with pasionate misery,
"that my child is to be reared up in the company of all that is most vile
and most degraded in the disease-haunted slums of indigent Paris; that,
with the connivance of that execrable fiend Marat, my only son will,
mayhap, come back to me one day a potential thief, a criminal probably,
a drink-sodden reprobate at best. Such things are done every day in this
glorious Revolution of ours--done in the sacred name of France and of
Liberty. And the moral murder of my child is to be my punishment for
daring to turn a deaf ear to the indign passion of a brute!"
Once more she paused, and when the melancholy echo of her broken
voice had died away in the narrow room, not another murmur broke the
stillness of this far-away corner of the great city.
The man did not move. He stood looking down upon the poor woman
before him, a world of pity expressed in his deep-set eyes. Through the
absolute silence around there came the sound as of a gentle flutter, the
current of cold air, mayhap, sighing through the ill-fitting shuters, or
the soft, weird soughing made by unseen things. The man's heart was
full of pity, and it seemed as if the Angel of Compassion had come at
his bidding and enfolded the sorrowing woman with his wings.
A moment or two later she was able to finish her pathetic narrative.
"Do you marvel, Monsieur," she said, "that I am still sane--still alive?
But I only live to find my child. I try and keep my reason in order to
fight the devilish cunning of a brute on his own ground. Up to now all
my inquiries have been in vain.